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Middlesex QUOTES

Middlesex QUOTES

1 " Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind. "

― Jeffrey Eugenides , Middlesex

2 " It was amazing how it worked: the tiniest bit of truth made credible the greatest lies. "

― Jeffrey Eugenides , Middlesex

3 " There was nowhere I could go that wouldn't be you. "

― Jeffrey Eugenides , Middlesex

4 " The last thing the hockey ball symbolized was Time itself, the unstoppability of it, the way we're chained to our bodies, which are chained to Time. "

― Jeffrey Eugenides , Middlesex

5 " 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

6 " The Statue of Liberty's gender changed nothing. It was the same here as anywhere: men and their wars. "

― Jeffrey Eugenides , Middlesex

7 " My change from girl to boy was far less dramatic than the distance anybody travels from infancy to adulthood. "

― Jeffrey Eugenides , Middlesex

8 " Historical fact: People stopped being people in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down: we've all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joy-sticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds. "

― Jeffrey Eugenides , Middlesex

9 " 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. "

― Jeffrey Eugenides , Middlesex

10 " Planning is for the world's great cities, for Paris, London, and Rome, for cities dedicated, at some level, to culture. Detroit, on the other hand, was an American city and therefore dedicated to money, and so design had given way to expediency. "

― Jeffrey Eugenides , Middlesex

11 " Judge Woodward envisioned the new Detroit as an urban Arcadia of interlocking hexagons. Each wheel was to be separate yet united. This dream never quite came to be. Planning is for the world's great cities, for Paris, London, and Rome, for cities dedicated, at some level, to culture. Detroit, on the other hand, was an American city and therefore dedicated to money, and so design had given way to expediency. "

― Jeffrey Eugenides , Middlesex

12 " I'm not sure, with a grandmother like mine, if you can ever become a true American in the sense of believing that life is about the pursuit of happiness. "

― Jeffrey Eugenides , Middlesex

13 " Children learn to speak Male or Female the way they learn to speak English or French. "

― Jeffrey Eugenides , Middlesex

14 " Desdemona, 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 , Middlesex

15 " Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. "

― Jeffrey Eugenides , Middlesex

16 " I mean, in the end it wasn't up to me. The big things never are. Birth, I mean, and death. And love. And what love bequeaths to use before we're born. "

― Jeffrey Eugenides , Middlesex

17 " This whole country's stolen. "

― Jeffrey Eugenides , Middlesex

18 " in Detroit, in July of 1967, what happened was no less than a guerrilla uprising.
The Second American Revolution. "

― Jeffrey Eugenides , Middlesex

19 " If they were going to kill you, would they knock? "

― Jeffrey Eugenides , Middlesex

20 " I understood at those times what I was leaving behind: the solidarity of a shared biology. Women know what it means to have a body. They understand its difficulties and frailties, its glories and pleasures. Men think their bodies are theirs alone. They tend them in private, even in public. "

― Jeffrey Eugenides , Middlesex