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aab160c
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Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.
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mind
life
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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1b9ca21
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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.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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18146bb
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She held herself very straight, like Audrey Hepburn, whom all women idolize and men never think about.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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08edfcc
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Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "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 mortali..
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hatred
sadness
fail
excitement
english
language
emotions
disappointment
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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920e2fe
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Basically what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she'd fly
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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4f9b019
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It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house, with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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530f37e
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In the end, it wasn't death that surprised her but the stubbornness of life.
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life
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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f6b4ece
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We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn't fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our ..
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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1421527
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We couldn't imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins, the emptiness and the calm.
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virgin-suicides
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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0f15a84
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Depression is like a bruise that never goes away. A bruise in your mind. You just got to be careful not to touch it where it hurts. It's always there, though.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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ab34efc
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I don't know what you're feeling. I won't even pretend.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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d97c733
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Dr. Armonson stitched up her wrist wounds. Within five minutes of the transfusion he declared her out of danger. Chucking her under the chin, he said, "What are you doing here, honey? You're not even old enough to know how bad life gets." And it was then Cecilia gave orally what was to be her only form of suicide note, and a useless one at that, because she was going to live: "Obviously, Doctor," she said, "you've never been a thirteen-year..
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suicide-attempt
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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ea99885
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In the end we had the pieces of the puzzle, but no matter how we put them together, gaps remained, oddly shaped emptinesses mapped by what surrounded them, like countries we couldn't name.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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748924f
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Can you see me? All of me? Probably not. No one ever really has.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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71b6fa3
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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.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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7dd99e1
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She'd become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read.
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majors
reading-books
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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6cf6fe1
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In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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1b2d7d0
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I was thinking how amazing it was that the world contained so many lives. Out in these streets people were embroiled in a thousand different matters, money problems, love problems, school problems. People were falling in love, getting married, going to drug rehab, learning how to ice-skate, getting bifocals, studying for exams, trying on clothes, getting their hair-cut and getting born. And in some houses people were getting old and sick an..
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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fed5dd6
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The girls took into their own hands decisions better left to God. They became too powerful to live among us, too self-concerned, too visionary, too blind.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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e6ddc9f
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A love story can never be about full possession. The happy marriage, the requited love, the desire that never dims--these are lucky eventualites but they aren't love stories. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart. Love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name. We value love not because it's stronger than death but because it's weaker. ..
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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c35b9fe
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All wisdom ends in paradox.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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c833960
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They had killed themselves over our dying forests, over manatees maimed by propellers as they surfaced to drink from garden hoses; they had killed themselves at the sight of used tires stacked higher than the pyramids; they had killed themselves over the failure to find a love none of us could ever be. In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so..
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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f58bc84
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We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.
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the-virgin-suicides
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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3252d25
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There was nowhere I could go that wouldn't be you.
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lovers
romance
love
separation
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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2a8a95e
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Everyone struggles against despair, but it always wins in the end. It has to. It's the thing that lets us say goodbye.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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108be42
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Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling.
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patriarchy
language
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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bbb0f84
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The essential matrimonial facts: that to be happy you have to find variety in repetition; that to go forward you have to come back to where you begin.
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marriage
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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092ecee
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There are some books that reached through the noise of life to grab you by the collar and speak only of the truest things.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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ddec0b4
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That was when Leonard realized something crucial about depression. The smarter you were, the worse it was. The sharper your brain, the more it cut you up.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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3e241a6
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She understood that her heart operated on its own instructions, that she had no control over it or, indeed, anything else.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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8fe6edc
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You never get over it, but you get to where it doesn't bother you so much.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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dd07f9c
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We knew that Cecilia had killed herself because she was a misfit, because the beyond called to her, and we knew that her sisters, once abandoned, felt her calling from that place, too.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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8137a37
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We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in...
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world
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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a8602e5
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She may have looked normal on the outside, but once you'd seen her handwriting you knew she was deliciously complicated inside.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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01a32f9
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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..
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rebellion
history
human
machine
manufacturing
workers
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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9af8f61
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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.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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92dba28
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People don't save other people. People save themselves.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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ef7d4f9
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In Madeleine's face was a stupidity Mitchell had never seen before. It was the stupidity of all normal people. It was the stupidity of the fortunate and the beautiful, of everybody who got what they wanted in life and so remained unremarkable.
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stupidity
luck
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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d4520eb
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Words, words, word. Once, I had the gift. I could make love out of words as a potter makes cups of clay. Love that overthrows empire. Love that binds two hearts together, come hellfire & brimstone. For sixpence a line, I could cause a riot in a nunnery. But now -- I have lost my gift. It's as if my quill is broken, as if the organ of my imagination has dried up, as if the proud -illegible word- of my genius has collapsed.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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a4d68a7
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We could never understand why the girls cared so much about being mature, or why they felt compelled to compliment each other, but sometimes, after one of us had read a long portion of the diary out loud, we had to fight back the urge to hug one another or tell each other how pretty we were. We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew..
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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950efd3
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But in the end it wasn't up to me. The bigs things never are. Birth, I mean, and death. And love. And what love bequeaths to us before we're born.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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848eb64
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She wanted a book to take her places she couldn't get to herself.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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1cddd6c
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and she had succeeded, on the second try, in hurling herself out of the world.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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46e63bd
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What lingered after them was not life, which always overcomes natural death, but the most trivial list of mundane facts: a clock ticking on a wall, a room dim at noon, and the outrageousness of a human being thinking only of herself.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |