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.