Tracey

“What if you had faith and performed good works, what if you died and went to heaven, and what if all the people you met there were people you didn't like?”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

“Life's under no obligation to give us what we expect. We take what we get and are thankful it's no worse than it is.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind

“Paris was a museum displaying exactly itself.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

“What were he and his friends doing, really, other than hanging from a branch, sticking their tongues out to catch the sweetness? He thought about the people he knew, with their excellent young bodies, their summerhouses, their cool clothes, their potent drugs, their liberalism, their orgasms, their haircuts. Everything they did was either pleasurable in itself or engineered to bring pleasure down the line. Even the people he knew who were "political" and who protested the war in El Salvador did so largely in order to bathe themselves in an attractively crusading light. And the artists were the worst, the painters and the writers, because they believed they were living for art when they were really feeding their narcissism. Mitchell had always prided himself on his discipline. He studied harder than anyone he knew. But that was just his way of tightening his grip on the branch.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot