MIDDLESEX - JEFFREY EUGENIDES

Middlesex - Pg 517

   Returning to Detroit from bright climes usually depressed me. But now I welcomed it. The blight eased the pain of my father's death, making it seem like a general state of affairs. At least the city didn't mock my grief by being sparkling or winsome.

Middlesex - Pg 512

   Most important, Milton got out without ever seeing me again. That would not have been easy. I like to think that my father's love for me was strong enough that he could have accepted me. But in some ways it's better that we never had to work that out, he and I. With respect to my father I will always remain a girl. There's a kind of purity in that, the purity of childhood.

Middlesex - Pg 489

   I was already stepping through the charmed door of those druggy, celebratory, youthful days... Even the air seemed on fire, subtly aflame with energy as it does when you are young, when the synapses are firing wildly and death is far away.

Middlesex - Pg 446

   But 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 to the job. And so they felt inclined to give it a boost.

Middlesex - Pg 445

    By cutting off my hair I was punishing myself for loving someone so much. I was trying to be stronger.

Middlesex - Pg 425

   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.

Middlesex - Pg 416

   Normally the most expressive thing about my mother's face was the gap between her front teeth. When she was listening to me, Tessie's tongue often pressed against that divot, that gate. This was the signal of her attention. My mother always paid great attention to whatever I said. And if I told her something funny, then her tongue dropped away, her head fell back, her mouth opened wide, and there were her front teeth, riven and ascendant.
   Every night at the Italian restaurant I tried to make this happen.

Middlesex - Pg 388

   The following Thursday morning was hot. It was one of those humid days when the atmosphere gets confused. Sitting on the porch, you could feel it: the air wishing it was water.

Middlesex - Pg 385

   So that was our love affair. Wordless, blinkered, a nighttime thing, a dream thing.

Middlesex - Pg 381

   A terrible thing happens when you water-ski. After you release the rope, you keep skimming over the water for a while, free. But there comes an inevitable moment when your speed fails to sustain your forward progress. The surface of the water breaks like glass. The depths open up to claim you. That was how I felt on land, watching the Object ski past. That same plunging, hopeless feeling, that emotional physics.

Middlesex - Pg 379

   So do boys and men announce their intentions. They cover you like a sarcophagus lid. And call it love.

Middlesex - Pg 357

   The smoke from his censer rose and curled, fragrant with antiquity. "Kyrie eleison," Father Mike sang. "Kyrie eleison." And though the words meant nothing to me, or almost nothing, I felt their weight, the deep groove they made in the air of time.

Middlesex - Pg 326

   I'd never been this close to the Obscure Object before. It was hard on my organism. My nervous system launched into "Flight of the Bumblebee." The violins were sawing away in my spine. The timpani were banging in my chest. At the same time, trying to conceal all this, I didn't move a muscle. I hardly breathed. That was the deal basically: catatonia without; frenzy within.

Middlesex - Pg 321

   Mr. da Silva had a relevant quotation for everything that happened to him and in this way evaded real life. Instead of eating his lunch, he told you what Oblonsky and Levin had for lunch in Anna Karenina. Or, describing a sunset from Daniel Deronda, he failed to notice the one that was presently falling over Michigan.

Middlesex - Pg 320

   Who has there been since? A few here and there, never long-lasting. And so, without permanence, I have fallen into the routine of my incomplete seductions.

Middlesex - Pg 319

   I remember the first time we took off our clothes in front of each other. It was like unwinding bandages.

Middlesex - Pg 318

   Chapter Eleven was hiding from this discovery, hiding behind windowpane, hiding on the top of elevators, hiding in the bed of Meg Zemka with her multiple O's and bad teeth, Meg Zemka who hissed in his ear while they made love, "Forget your family, man! They're bourgeois pigs! Your dad's an exploiter, man! Forget 'em. They're dead, man. Dead. This is what's real. Right here. Come and get it, baby!"

Middlesex - Pg 312

   He bought a motorcycle. He started meditating. He claimed to understand 2001: A Space Odyssey, even the ending.

Middlesex - Pg 306

   Cut my hair? Never! I was still growing it out. My dream was to someday live inside it.

Middlesex - Pg 298

   All of a sudden America wasn't about hamburgers and hot rods anymore. It was about the Mayflower and Plymouth Rock. It was about something that had happened for two minutes four hundred years ago, instead of everything that had happened since. Instead of everything that was happening now!

Middlesex - Pg 297

   The Charm Bracelets didn't study. They never raised their hands in class. They sat in the back, slumping, and went home each day carrying the prop of a notebook. (But maybe the Charm Bracelets 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. The only trust fund I have is this story, and unlike a prudent Wasp, I'm dipping into principal, spending it all . . .)

Middlesex - Pg 266

   I fall between her legs, I fall on top of her, we sink . . . and then we're twirling, spinning in the water, me on top, then her, then me, and giggling, and making bird cries. Steam envelops us, cloaks us; light sparkles on the agitated water; and we keep spinning, so that at some point I'm not sure which hands are mine, which legs. We aren't kissing. This game is far less serious, more playful, freestyle, but we're gripping each other, trying not to let the other's slippery body go, and our knees bump, our tummies slap, our hips slide back and forth. Various submerged softnesses on Clementine's body are delivering crucial information to mine, information I store away but won't understand until years later. How long do we spin? I have no idea.

Middlesex - Pg 261

   Although he never said a word to me, I loved my Chaplinesque papou. His speechlessness seemed to be an act of refinement. It went with his elegant clothes, his shoes with woven vamps, the glaze of his hair.

Middlesex - Pg 223

   Everything about us was the same. And so she picked me up and I did what grandchildren are supposed to do: I erased the years between us. I gave Desdemona back her original skin.

Middlesex - Pg 217

   Already the world feels heavier, now I'm a part of it. I'm talking about bandages and sopped cotton, the smell of mildew in movie theaters, and of all the lousy cats and their stinking litter boxes, of rain on city streets when the dust comes up and the old Italian men take their folding chairs inside. Up until now it hasn't been my world. Not my America. But here we are, at last.

Middlesex - Pg 217

   Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," and "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 again 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."

Middlesex - Pg 189

   Drilling at night and going to Saturday matinees, jumping into the sea and sliding down in movie seats, worrying and regretting and hoping and trying to forget—nevertheless, to be perfectly honest, mostly what people did during the war was write letters.

Middlesex - Pg 186

   In contact with the skull, an army helmet transmitted images directly into the brain. These were of objects the helmet was designed to keep out. Bullets, for instance. And shrapnel. The helmet closed off the mind for contemplation of these essential realities.

Middlesex - Pg 178

   He might not have been pursuing her because she was the only girl shorter than he was. He might have been responding to the need in Tessie's eyes, her desperate yearning to believe that there was something instead of nothing.

Middlesex - Pg 176

   And so it began. He played "Begin the Beguine" against Tessie's collarbone. He played "Moonface" against her smooth cheeks. Pressing the clarinet right up against the red toenails that had so dazzled him, he played "It Goes to Your Feet." With a secrecy they didn't acknowledge, Milton and Tessie drifted off to quiet parts of the house, and there, lifting her skirt a little, or removing a sock, or once, when nobody was home, pulling up her blouse to expose her lower back, Tessie 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.

Middlesex - Pg 169

   Artie Shaw's big hit "Begin the Beguine" floats on the humid air. It freezes squirrels on telephone lines, who cock their heads alertly to listen. It rustles the leaves of apple trees and sets a rooster on a weather vane spinning. With its fast beat and swirling melody, "Begin the Beguine" rises over the victory gardens and the lawn furniture, the bramble-choked fences and porch swings; it hops the fence into the backyard of the O'Toole Boardinghouse, stepping around the mostly male tenants' recreational activities—a lawn-bowling swath, some forgotten croquet mallets—and then the song climbs the ragged ivy along the brick facing, past windows where bachelors snooze, scratch their beards, or, in the case of Mr. Danelikov, formulate chess problems; up and up it soars, Artie Shaw's best and most beloved recording from back in '39, which you can still hear playing from radios all over the city, music so fresh and lively it seems to ensure the purity of the American cause and the Allies' eventual triumph; but now here it is, finally, coming through Theodora's window, as she fans her toes to dry them. And, hearing it, my mother turns toward the window and smiles.

Middlesex - Pg 168

   On this evening in the middle of Wold War II, a serenade is about to begin. It's minutes away. If you listen closely you can hear a window scraping open, a fresh reed being inserted into a woodwind's mouthpiece. The music which started everything and on which, you could say, my entire existence depended, is on its way.

Middlesex - Pg 167

   Julie told me a Barcelona story of getting locked in the Parque Güell with her boyfriend after visiting hours. Here it comes, I thought. The first ex-boyfriend had been summoned. Soon the rest would follow. They would file around the table, presenting their deficiencies, telling of their addictions, their cheating hearts. After that, I would be called on to present my own ragged gallery. And here is where my first dates generally go wrong.

Middlesex - Pg 163

   Coming through the heating vent, Fard Muhammad's deep voice had made her solar plexus vibrate. Now, closer up, it penetrates her entire body. The rumble spreads down her arms until her fingers are tingling.

Middlesex - Pg 140

   When she recognized Gratiot's diagonal swath, she stood up and called out in a ringing voice: "Sonnamabiche!" She had no idea what this English word meant. She had heard Sourmelina employ it whenever she missed her stop. As usual, it worked. The driver braked the streetcar and the passengers moved quickly aside to let her off. They seemed surprised when she smiled and thanked them.

Middlesex - Pg 113

   Desdemona came into a physical knowledge of these women, shared their pains and sighs, their fear and protectiveness, their outrage, their expectation. Like them she put a hand to her belly, supporting the world.

Middlesex - Pg 106

   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.

Middlesex - Pg 68

   We Greeks get married in circles, to impress upon ourselves the essential matrimonial facts: that to be happy you have to find variety in repetition; that to go forward you have to come back where you began.

Middlesex - Pg 63

   (In the West, this legend would slowly mutate over three millennia, until it became the story of a physicist and an apple. Either way, the meanings are the same: great discoveries, whether of silk or of gravity, are always windfalls. They happen to people loafing under trees.)

Middlesex - Pg 54

   (And did I mention how in summer the streets of Smyrna were lined with baskets of rose petals? And how everyone in the city could speak French, Italian, Greek, Turkish, English, and Dutch? And did I tell you about the famous figs, brought in by camel caravan and dumped onto the ground, huge piles of pulpy fruit lying in the dirt, with dirty women steeping them in salt water and children squatting to defecate behind the clusters? Did I mention how the reek of the fig women mixed with pleasanter smells of almond trees, mimosa, laurel, and peach, and how everybody wore masks on Mardi Gras and had elaborate dinners on the decks of frigates? I want to mention these things because they all happened in that city that was no place exactly, that was part of no country because it was all countries, and because now if you go there you'll see modern high-rises, amnesiac boulevards, teeming sweatshops, a NATO headquarters, and a sign that says Izmir...)

Middlesex - Pg 47

   The wound was on the man's thumb, where the nail was missing.
   "How did this happen?"
   "First the Greeks invaded," the refugee said. "Then the Turks invaded back. My hand got in the way."

Middlesex - Pg 44

   "I didn't know death would be like this, lieutenant. I feel close to you. I'm gone. I've taken that trip to Hades, yet I can still see you. Listen to me. Death is not the end. This is what I've discovered. We remain, we persist. The dead see that I'm one of them. They're all around me. You can't see them, but they're here. Mothers with children, old women—everyone's here. Tell the cook to bring me my lunch."

Middlesex - Pg 34

   To Desdemona periphescence felt like a lake of warmth flooding up from her abdomen and across her chest. It spread like the 180-proof, fiery flood of a mint-green Finnish liqueur. With the pumping of two efficient glands in her neck, it heated her face. And then the warmth got other ideas and started spreading into places a girl like Desdemona didn't allow it to go, and she broke off the stare and turned away. She walked to the window, leaving the periphescence behind, and the breeze from the valley cooled her down.

Middlesex - Pg 30

   The jostling, the bumping of porters and sidestepping of sacks made him tense. He thought how nice it would be if everyone would just stop moving a moment, if they would stand still to admire the luminosity of the cocoons in the evening light; but of course no one ever did. They went on yelling and thrusting cocoons in one another's faces and lying and haggling.

Middlesex - Pg 20

   I'm the final clause in a periodic sentence, and that sentence begins a long time ago, in another language, and you have to read it from the beginning to get to the end, which is my arrival.

Middlesex - Pg 18

   I was extracted, spanked, and hosed off, in that order. they wrapped me in a blanket and put me on display among six other infants, four boys, two girls, all of them, unlike me, correctly tagged. This can't be true but I remember it: sparks slowly filling a dark screen.
   Someone had switched on my eyes.

Middlesex - Pg 11

   My father had only to say an affectionate word and she would have forgiven him. Not me but somebody like me might have been made that night. An infinite number of possible selves crowded the threshold, me among them but with no guaranteed ticket, the hours moving slowly, the planets in the heavens circling at their usual pace, weather coming into it, too, because my mother was afraid of thunderstorms and would have cuddled against my father had it rained that night. But, no, clear skies held out, as did my parents' stubbornness. The bedroom light went out. They stayed on their own sides of the bed. At last, from my mother, "Night." And from my father, "See you in the morning." The moments that led up to me fell into place as though decreed. Which, I guess, is why I think about them so much.

GONE GIRL - GILLIAN FLYNN

Gone Girl - Pg 298

   She raised her glass again.
   "What's your name?" I asked.
   "Another Scotch?"
   "That's a gorgeous name."

Gone Girl - Pg 265

   The TV goes to a commercial for air freshener. A woman is spraying air freshener so her family will be happy. Then to a commercial for very thin panty liners so a woman can wear a dress and dance and meet the man she will later spray air freshener for.

Gone Girl - Pg 259

   There is an unfair responsibility that comes with being an only child—you grow up knowing you aren't allowed to disappoint, you're not even allowed to die. There isn't a replacement toddling around; you're it. It makes you desperate to be flawless, and it also makes you drunk with the power. In such ways are despots made.

Gone Girl - Pg 224

   We just want you to be happy. Rand and Marybeth said that all the time, but they never explained how. So many lessons and opportunities and advantages, and they never taught me how to be happy.

Gone Girl - Pg 205

   I won't get an abortion and I won't divorce Nick, not yet, because I can still remember how he'd dive into the ocean on a summer day and stand on his hands, his legs flailing out of the water, and leap back up with the best seashell just for me, and I'd let my eyes get dazzled by the sun, and I'd shut them and see the colors blinking like raindrops on the inside of my eyelids as Nick kissed me with salty lips and I'd think, I am so lucky, this is my husband, this man will be the father of my children. We'll all be so happy.

Gone Girl - Pg 179

   I'd started with a lie—the cat box—and turned that into a surprising burst of pure truth, and I realized why criminals talked too much, because it feels so good to tell your story to a stranger, someone who won't call bullshit, someone forced to listen to your side.