Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex is a gem of aread. It is definitely one of my best reads in recent memory. Here are some memorable lines from this Pulitzer Prize winning book.
“Everyone struggles against despair, but always wins in the end. It has to, it’s the thing that lets us say goodbye.” ~ Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex
“She understood that her heart operated on its own instructions, that she had no control over it, or indeed, anything else.” ~ Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex
“The essential matrimonial facts: that to be happy you have to find variety in repetition; that to go forward you have to come back.” ~ Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex
“The mind self-edits. The mind airbrushes. It’s a different thing to be inside a body than outside. From outside, you can look, inspect, compare. From inside, there is no comparison.” ~ Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex
“The only way we know it’s true is that we both dreamed it. That’s what reality is. It’s a dream everyone has together.” ~ Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex
“Where else would she feel more comfortable than in this subterranean realm where people wrote down what they couldn’t say, where they gave voice to their most shameful longings and knowledge.” ~ Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex
“My change from girl to boy was far less dramatic than the distance anybody travels from infancy to adulthood.” ~ Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex
“I mean, in the end, it wasn’t up to me. The big things never are. Birth, I mean, and death. And what love bequeaths to use before we’re born.” ~ Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex
“When you travel like I did, vague about destination and with an open-ended itinerary, a holy-seeming openness takes over your character. It’s the reason the first philosophers were peripatetic.” ~ Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex
Happy reading!
Haven’t read my review of Middlesex yet? Click here.
