Serenity > Serenity's Quotes

“Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“Emotions, 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, Middlesex

“I live my own life and nurse my own wounds. It's not the best way to live. But it's the way I am.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“Can you see me? All of me? Probably not. No one ever really has.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“I was thinking how amazing it was that the world contained so many lives. Out in these streets people were embroiled in a thousand different matters, money problems, love problems, school problems. People were falling in love, getting married, going to drug rehab, learning how to ice-skate, getting bifocals, studying for exams, trying on clothes, getting their hair-cut and getting born. And in some houses people were getting old and sick and were dying, leaving others to grieve. It was happening all the time, unnoticed, and it was the thing that really mattered.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“Everyone struggles against despair, but it always wins in the end. It has to. It's the thing that lets us say goodbye.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“The essential matrimonial facts: that to be happy you have to find variety in repetition; that to go forward you have to come back to where you begin.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“She understood that her heart operated on its own instructions, that she had no control over it or, indeed, anything else.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“The mind self-edits. The mind airbrushes. It's a different thing to be inside a body than outside. From outside, you can look, inspect, compare. From inside there is no comparison.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“But in the end it wasn't up to me. The bigs things never are. Birth, I mean, and death. And love. And what love bequeaths to us before we're born.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“I was beginning to understand something about normality. Normality wasn't normal. It couldn't be. If normality were normal, everybody could leave it alone. They could sit back and let normality manifest itself. But people-and especially doctors- had doubts about normality. They weren't sure normality was up the job. And so they felt inclined to give it a boost.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“But 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, Middlesex

“The only way we know it's true is that we both dreamed it. That's what reality is. It's a dream everyone has together.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“When I think back about my immediate reaction to that redheads girl, it seems to spring from an appreciation of natural beauty. I mean the heart pleasure you get from looking at speckled leaves or the palimpsested bark of plane trees in Provence. There was something richly appealing to her color combination, the ginger snaps floating in the milk-white skin, the golden highlights in the strawberry hair. it was like autumn, looking at her. It was like driving up north to see the colors.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“I went into the desert to forget about you. But the sand was the color of your hair. The desert sky was the color of your eyes. There was nowhere I could go that wouldn't be you.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“It's often said that a traumatic experience early in life marks a person forever, pulls her out of line, saying, "Stay there. Don't move.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“The television replaced the sound of conversation that was missing from my grandparents' lives.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“We stood silent. After a moment I said, "Real Geniuses never think they're geniuses."
"Who says?"
"Me."
"Because why?"
"Because genius is nine-tenths perspiration. Haven't you ever heard that? As soon as you think you're a genius, you slack off. You think everything you do is so great and everything.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“There have been hermaphrodites around forever, Cal. Forever. Plato said that the original human being was a hermaphrodite. Did you know that? The original person was two halves, one male, one female. Then these got separated. That's why everybody's always searching for their other half. Except for us. We've got both halves already.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“We're all made up of many parts, other halves. Not just me.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“It was called evolutionary biology. Under its sway, the sexes were separated again, men into hunters and women into gatherers. Nurture no longer formed us; nature did. Impulses of hominids dating from 20,000 B.C. were still controlling us. And so today on television and in magazines you get the current simplifications. Why can't men communicate? (Because they had to be quiet on the hunt.) Why do women communicate so well? (Because they had to call out to one another where the fruits and berries were.) Why can men never find things around the house? (Because they have a narrow field of vision, useful in tracking prey.) Why can women find things so easily? (Because in protecting the nest they were used to scanning a wide field.) Why can't women parallel-park? (Because low testosterone inhibits spatial ability.) Why won't men ask for directions? (Because asking for directions is a sign of weakness, and hunters never show weakness.) This is where we are today. Men and women, tired of being the same, want to be different again.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“Pregnancy humbles husbands. After an initial rush of male pride they quickly recognise the minor role that nature had assigned them in the drama of reproduction.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“I hadn't gotten old enough yet to realize that living sends a person not into the future but back into the past, to childhood and before birth, finally, to commune with the dead. You get older, you puff on the stairs, you enter the body of your father. From there it's only a quick jump to your grandparents, and then before you know it you're time traveling. In this life we grow backwards.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“It was amazing how it worked: the tiniest bit of truth made credible the greatest lies.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“She had given birth to me and nursed me and brought me up. She had known me before I knew myself and now she had no say in the matter. Life started out one thing and then suddenly turned a corner and became something else.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“Chunks of his life fell away, so that while we were moving ahead in time, he was moving back.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“Whereas my grandfather was getting used to a much more terrifying reality. Holding my hand to keep his balance, as trees and bushes made strange, sliding movements in his peripheral vision, Lefty was confronting the possibility that consciousness was a biological accident. Though he'd never been religious, he realized now that he'd always believed in the soul, in a force of personality that survived death. But as his mind continued to waver, to short-circuit, he finally arrived at the cold-eyed conclusion, so at odds with his youthful cheerfulness, that the brain was just an organ like any other and that when it failed he would be no more.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“A changeableness, too, as if beneath my visible face there was another, having second thoughts.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“Children learn to speak Male or Female the way they learn to speak English or French.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“In the end he became as fragmentary as the poems of Sappho he never succeeded in restoring, and finally one morning he looked up into the face of the woman who’d been the greatest love of his life and failed to recognize her. And then there was another kind of blow inside his head; blood pooled in his brain for the last time, washing even the last fragments of his self away.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex