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61 " It was convenient to call them snipers, because if they weren’t snipers, then what were they? The governor didn’t say it; the newspapers didn’t say it; the history books still do not say it, but I, who watched the entire thing on my bike, saw it clearly: in Detroit, in July of 1967, what happened was nothing less than a guerrilla uprising. The Second American Revolution. "
― Jeffrey Eugenides , Middlesex
62 " Figures. They let you in for free. Then you gotta pay for the rest of your life. "
63 " There were pencil scrawls and ink stains, dried blood, snack crumbs; and the leather binding itself was secured to the lectern by a chain. Here was a book that contained the collected knowledge of the past while giving evidence of present social conditions...The dictionary contained every word in the English language but the chain knew only a few. It knew thief and steal and, maybe, purloined. The chain spoke of poverty and mistrust and inequality and decadence. "
64 " I'd never seen a creature with so many freckles before. A Big Bang had occurred, originating at the bridge of her nose, and the force of this explosion had sent galaxies of freckles hurtling and drifting to every end of her curved, warm-blooded universe. "
65 " What really mattered in life, what gave it weight, was death. "
66 " On the floors above Delivery, in flowerless rooms, women lay recovering from hysterectomies and mastectomies. Teenage girls with burst ovarian cysts nodded out on morphine. It was all around me from the beginning, the weight of female suffering, with its biblical justification and vanishing acts. "
67 " (But what humans forget, cells remember. The body, that elephant …) Spring "
68 " Hogy az emberek miért pont ahhoz kötik az életüket, akikhez aztán kötik, azt többnyire épp az érintettek értik a legkevésbé. "
69 " And so a strange new possibility is arising. Compromised, indefinite, sketchy, but not entirely obliterated: free will is making a comeback. Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind. "
70 " because we watched her so closely out of the corners of our eyes, everything she did made too much noise, her cigarette smoke got into everything, she drank too much wine at dinner. "
71 " The sonogram didn't exist at the time; the spoon was the next best thing. "
72 " Though the weather was cool, the beach at Herringsdorf was dotted with quite a few diehard nudists. Primarily men, they lay walrus-like on towels or boosterously congregated. "
73 " Within the substandard construction of the Charlevoix church, literally upon a shaky foundation, I was baptized into the Orthodox faith; a faith that had existed long before Protestantism had anything to protest and before Catholicism called itself catholic; a faith that stretched back to the beginnings of Christianity, when it was Greek and not Latin, and which, without an Aquinas to reify it, had remained shrouded in the smoke of tradition and mystery whence it began. "
74 " You used to be able to tell a person's nationality by the face. Immigration ended that. Next you discerned nationality via the footwear. Globalization ended that. Those Finnish seal puppies, those German flounders - you don't see them much anymore. Only Nikes, on Basque, on Dutch, on Siberian feet. "
75 " After all the screaming in our house, there reigned, that winter on Middlesex, only silence. A silence so profound that, like the left foot of the President’s secretary, it erased portions of the official record. "
76 " Luce even analyzed my prose style to see if I wrote in a linear, masculine way, or in a circular, feminine one. "
77 " I should also mention, with the vestigial pang of a once flat-chested girl, Desdemona's voluptuous figure. "
78 " Stomach-sleepers like me were in retreat from reality, given to dark perception and the meditative arts. This "
79 " Whatever happened now would become the truth, that whatever he seemed to be would become what he was - already an American, in other words. "
80 " From my birth when they went undetected, to my baptism where they upstaged the priest, to my troubled adolescence when they didn’t do much of anything and then did everything at once, my genitals have been the most significant thing that ever happened to me. "