01c. 1960 ADA love story can never be about full possession. The happy marriage, the requited love, the desire that never dims--these are lucky eventualites but they aren't love stories. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart. Love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name.We value love not because it's stronger than death but because it's weaker. Say what you want about love: death will finish it. You will not go on loving in the grave, not in any physical way that will at all resemble love as we know it on earth. The perishable nature of love is what gives love its importance in our lives. If it were endless, if it were on tap, love wouldn't hit us the way it does.And we certainly wouldn't write about it.Jeffrey Eugenides / quote ↗
03c. 1960 ADIn the end, it wasn't death that surprised her but the stubbornness of life.Jeffrey Eugenides / quote ↗
04c. 1960 ADYes, you need a passport to prove to the world that you exist. The people at passport control, they cannot look at you and see you are a person. No! They have to look at a little photograph of you. Then they believe you exist.Jeffrey Eugenides / quote ↗
05c. 1960 ADIt was amazing how it worked: the tiniest bit of truth made credible the greatest lies.Jeffrey Eugenides / quote ↗
07c. 1960 ADO Earth, lie heavily upon her eyes;Seal her sweet eyes weary of watching Earth;Lie close around her; leave no room for mirthWith its harsh laughter, nor for sound of sighs.She hath no questions, she hath no replies.Jeffrey Eugenides / quote ↗
08c. 1960 ADShe thought a writer should work harder writing a book than she did reading it.Jeffrey Eugenides / quote ↗
09c. 1960 ADThe last thing the hockey ball symbolized was Time itself, the unstoppability of it, the way we're chained to our bodies, which are chained to Time.Jeffrey Eugenides / quote ↗
10c. 1960 ADBut maybe they understood more about life than I did. From an early age they knew what little value the world placed in books, and so didn't waste their time with them. Whereas I, even now, persist in believing that these black marks on white paper bear the greatest significance, that if I keep writing, I might be able to catch the rainbow of consciousness in a jar.Jeffrey Eugenides / quote ↗
11c. 1960 ADReading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights. What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth century novel. There were going to be people in it. Something was going to happen to them in a place resembling the world. Then too there were lots of weddings in Wharton and Austen. There were all kinds of irresistible gloomy men.Jeffrey Eugenides / quote ↗
12c. 1960 ADPay no attention to the terrors that visit you in the night. The psyche is at its lowest ebb then, unable to defend itself. The desolation that envelops you feels like truth, but isn't. It's just mental fatigue masquerading as insight.Jeffrey Eugenides / quote ↗
13c. 1960 ADThe Statue of Liberty's gender changed nothing. It was the same here as anywhere: men and their wars.Jeffrey Eugenides / quote ↗
14c. 1960 ADI saw the movie," he said. "I know what it's about. Listen to this. When girls get to be about twelve or so"—he leaned toward us—"their tits bleed.Jeffrey Eugenides / quote ↗
15c. 1960 ADMy change from girl to boy was far less dramatic than the distance anybody travels from infancy to adulthood.Jeffrey Eugenides / quote ↗
16c. 1960 ADHistorical fact: People stopped being people in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down: we've all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joy-sticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds.Jeffrey Eugenides / quote ↗
17c. 1960 ADVirgin suicideWhat was that she cried?No use in stayin'On this holocaust rideShe gave me her cherryShe's my virgin suicideJeffrey Eugenides / quote ↗
18c. 1960 ADTessie allowed Milton to press his clarinet to her skin and fill her body with music. At first it only tickled her. But after a while the notes spread deeper into her body. She felt the vibrations penetrate her muscles, pulsing in waves, until they rattled her bones and made her inner organs hum.Jeffrey Eugenides / quote ↗
19c. 1960 ADPlanning is for the world's great cities, for Paris, London, and Rome, for cities dedicated, at some level, to culture. Detroit, on the other hand, was an American city and therefore dedicated to money, and so design had given way to expediency.Jeffrey Eugenides / quote ↗
20c. 1960 ADJudge Woodward envisioned the new Detroit as an urban Arcadia of interlocking hexagons. Each wheel was to be separate yet united. This dream never quite came to be. Planning is for the world's great cities, for Paris, London, and Rome, for cities dedicated, at some level, to culture. Detroit, on the other hand, was an American city and therefore dedicated to money, and so design had given way to expediency.Jeffrey Eugenides / quote ↗
21c. 1960 ADI'm not sure, with a grandmother like mine, if you can ever become a true American in the sense of believing that life is about the pursuit of happiness.Jeffrey Eugenides / quote ↗
22c. 1960 ADAt that moment Mr. Lisbon had the feeling that he didn't know who she was, that children were only strangers you agreed to live with, and he reached out in order to meet her for the first time.Jeffrey Eugenides / quote ↗
23c. 1960 ADThey had killed themselves over our dying forests, over manatees maimed by propellers as they surfaced to drink from garden hoses; they had killed themselves at the sight of used tires stacked higher than the pyramids; they had killed themselves over the failure to find a love none of us could ever be. In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws.Jeffrey Eugenides / quote ↗
24c. 1960 ADWe realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in...Jeffrey Eugenides / quote ↗
