01c. 1960 ADMr. Lisbon had the feeling that he didn't know who she was, that children were only strangers you agreed to live with.Jeffrey Eugenides / quote ↗
02c. 1960 ADChildren learn to speak Male or Female the way they learn to speak English or French.Jeffrey Eugenides / quote ↗
03c. 1960 ADWe knew the pain of winter rushing up your skirt, and the ache of keeping your knees together in class, and how drab and infuriating it was to jump rope while the boys played baseball. We could never understand why the girls cared so much about being mature, or why they felt compelled to compliment each other...Jeffrey Eugenides / quote ↗
04c. 1960 ADCollege feminists made fun of skyscrapers, saying they were phallic symbols. They said the same thing about space rockets, even though, if you stopped to think about it, rockets were shaped the way they were not because of phallocentrism but because of aerodynamics. Would a vagina-shaped Apollo 11 have made it to the moon? Evolution had created the penis. It was a useful structure for getting certain things done. And if it worked for the pistils of flowers as well as the inseminatory organs of Homo sapiens, whose fault was that but Biology's? But no--anything large or grand in design, any long novel, big sculpture, or towering building, became, in the opinion of the "women" Mitchell knew at college, manifestations of male insecurity about the size of their penises.Jeffrey Eugenides / quote ↗
05c. 1960 ADMr. Lisbon knew his parental and neighborly duty entailed putting the retainer in a Ziploc bag, calling the Kriegers, and telling them their expensive orthodontal device was in safe keeping. Acts like theses -- simple, humane, conscientious, forgiving -- held life together. Only a few days earlier he would have been able to perform them. But now he took the retainer and dropped it in the toiler. He pressed the handle. The retainer, jostled int he surge, disappeared down the porcelain throat, and, when waters abated, floated triumphantly, mockingly, out, Mr. Lisbon waited for the tank to refill and flushed again, but the same thing happened. The replica of the boy's mouth clung to the white slope.Jeffrey Eugenides / quote ↗
06c. 1960 ADThey thought depression was like bieng 'depressed'. They thought it was like being in a bad mood, only worse. Therefore, they tried to get him to snap out of it.Jeffrey Eugenides / quote ↗
07c. 1960 ADEmotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words.I don't believe in "sadness", "joy", or "regret".Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that is oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions.Jeffrey Eugenides / quote ↗
08c. 1960 ADDepression is like a bruise that never goes away. A bruise in your mind. You just got to be careful not to touch it where it hurts. It's always there, though.Jeffrey Eugenides / quote ↗
09c. 1960 ADHe had the feeling that there was something physically behind his eyes, blocking the light.Jeffrey Eugenides / quote ↗
10c. 1960 ADHe felt as if he were being violently emptied out, as if a big magnet were pulling his blood and fluids down into the earth. He was weeping again, unstoppably, his head like the chandelier in his grandparents’ house in Buffalo, the one that was too high for them to reach and that every time he visited had one fewer bulb alight. His head was an old chandelier, going dark.Jeffrey Eugenides / quote ↗
11c. 1960 ADI don't want to ruin your life," Leonard said in a gentler tone."You're not ruining it.""The drugs just slow the process down. But the end's inevitable. The question is, how to turn this thing off?" He jabbed at his head with his index finger. "It's cutting me up, and I can't turn it off. Madeleine, listen to me. Listen. I'm not going to get better.Jeffrey Eugenides / quote ↗
12c. 1960 ADHousehold objects lost meaning. A bedside clock became a hunk of molded plastic, telling something called time, in a world marking its passage for some reason.Jeffrey Eugenides / quote ↗
13c. 1960 ADDesdemona, mourning her parents, was still imprisoned by the past. And so she stood on the mountain, looking down at the emancipated city, and felt cheated by her ability to feel happy by everybody else.Jeffrey Eugenides / quote ↗
14c. 1960 ADOften he had the impression that the person answering questions from the scratchy armchair was a dummy he was controlling, that this had been true throughout his life, and that his life had become so involved with operating the dummy that he, the ventriloquist, had ceased to have a personality, becoming just an arm stuffed up the puppet's back.Jeffrey Eugenides / quote ↗
15c. 1960 ADThere’s a thing they’ve figured out about love. Scientifically. They’ve done studies to find out what keeps couples together. Do you know what it is? It isn’t getting along. Isn’t having money, or children, or a similar outlook on life. It’s just checking in with each other. Doing little kindnesses for each other. At breakfast, you pass the jam. Or, on a trip to New York City, you hold hands for a second in a smelly subway elevator. You ask “How was your day?” and pretend to care. Stuff like that really works.Jeffrey Eugenides / quote ↗
16c. 1960 ADFind the Bad Guy means how, when you’re arguing with your spouse, both people are trying to win the argument. Who didn’t close the garage door? Who left the Bigfoot hair clump in the shower drain? What you have to realize, as a couple, is that there is no bad guy. You can’t win an argument when you’re married. Because if you win, your spouse loses, and resents losing, and then you lose, too, pretty much.Jeffrey Eugenides / quote ↗
17c. 1960 ADShe lost much of her appetite. At night, an invisible hand kept shaking her awake every few hours. Grief was physiological, a disturbance of the blood. Sometimes a whole minute would pass in nameless dread - the bedside clock ticking, the blue moonlight coating the window like glue - before she`d remember the brutal fact that had caused it.Jeffrey Eugenides / quote ↗
18c. 1960 ADEmotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." I'd like to show how "intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age." I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever.Jeffrey Eugenides / quote ↗
19c. 1960 ADAs they were walking, a beggar came up, holding his hand out and crying, "Baksheesh! Baksheesh!"Mike kept on going but Mitchell stopped. Digging into his pocket, he pulled out twenty paise and placed it in the beggar's dirty hand.Mike said, "I used to give to beggars when I first came here. But then I realized, it's hopeless. It never stops.""Jesus said you should give to whoever asks you," Mitchell said."Yeah, well," Mike said, "obviously Jesus was never in Calcutta.Jeffrey Eugenides / quote ↗
20c. 1960 ADWouldn't it be nice to be done with it? To be done with sex and longing? Mitchell could almost imagine pulling it off, sitting on a bridge at night with the Seine flowing by. He looked up at all the lighted windows along the river's arc. He thought of all the people going to sleep or reading or listening to music, all the lives contained by a great city like this, and, floating up in his mind, rising just above the rooftops, he tried to feel, to vibrate among, all those million tremulous souls. He was sick of craving, of wanting, of hoping, of losing.Jeffrey Eugenides / quote ↗
21c. 1960 ADThe girls took into their own hands decisions better left to God. They became too powerful to live among us, too self-concerned, too visionary, too blind.Jeffrey Eugenides / quote ↗
22c. 1960 ADWe knew that Cecilia had killed herself because she was a misfit, because the beyond called to her, and we knew that her sisters, once abandoned, felt her calling from that place, too.Jeffrey Eugenides / quote ↗
23c. 1960 ADOn the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide—it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese—the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope.Jeffrey Eugenides / quote ↗
24c. 1960 ADDuring a warm winter rain ... the basins of her collarbones collected water.Jeffrey Eugenides / quote ↗
