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77193e2
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This can't be true but I remember it.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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3258b1e
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The television replaced the sound of conversation that was missing from my grandparents' lives.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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40dfa98
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We stood silent. After a moment I said, "Real Geniuses never think they're geniuses." "Who says?" "Me." "Because why?" "Because genius is nine-tenths perspiration. Haven't you ever heard that? As soon as you you're a genius, you slack off. You think everything you do is so great and everything."
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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42d73bb
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But, like anyone in love, Madeleine believed that her own relationship was different from every other relationship, immune from typical problems.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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7e22cc7
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Though at this moment she felt abused, abandoned, and ashamed of herself, Madeleine knew that she was still young, that she had her whole life ahead of her--a life in which, if she persevered, she might do something special--and that part of persevering meant getting past moments just like this one, when people made you feel small, unlovable, and took away your confidence.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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27d16d8
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They were bound for college, husbands, child-rearing, unhappiness only dimly perceived--bound, in other words, for life.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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c92a5e2
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Mania was a mental state every bit as dangerous as depression. At first, however, it felt like a rush of euphoria. You were completely captivating, completely charming; everybody loved you. You took ridiculous physical risks, jumping out of a third-floor dorm room into a snowbank, for instance. It made you spend your year's fellowship money in five days. It was like having a wild party in your head, a party at which you were the drunken hos..
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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280d709
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She could become a spinster, like Emily Dickinson, writing poems full of dashes and brilliance, and never gaining weight.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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f9a15f2
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The window was still open," Mr Lisbon said. "I don't think we'd ever remembered to shut it. It was all clear to me. I knew I had to close that window or else she'd go on jumping out of it forever."
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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b799536
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It took courage to let things fall apart so beautifully.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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a92f88e
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It was called evolutionary biology. Under its sway, the sexes were separated again, men into hunters and women into gatherers. Nurture no longer formed us; nature did. Impulses of hominids dating from 20,000 B.C. were still controlling us. And so today on television and in magazines you get the current simplifications. Why can't men communicate? (Because they had to be quiet on the hunt.) Why do women communicate so well? (Because they had ..
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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f44ce91
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With most people suicide is like Russian roulette. Only one chamber has a bullet. With the Lisbon girls, the gun was loaded. A bullet for family abuse. A bullet for genetic predisposition. A bullet for historical malaise. A bullet for inevitable momentum. The two other bullets are impossible to name, but that doesn't mean the chambers were empty.
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jeffrey eugenides |
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2da2a00
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There have been hermaphrodites around forever, Cal. Forever. Plato said that the original human being was a hermaphrodite. Did you know that? The original person was two halves, one male, one female. Then these got separated. That's why everybody's always searching for their other half. Except for us. We've got both halves already.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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f066c58
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She kept her face to the floor, moving in her personal oblivion, her sunflower eyes fixed on the predicament of her life we would never understand.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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2708c02
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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. You get older, you puff on the stairs, you enter the body of your father. From there it's only a quick jump to your grandparents, and then before you know it you're time traveling. In this life we grow backwards.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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342ba47
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Paris was a museum displaying exactly itself.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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354a252
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Lux spent the ride dialing the radio for her favorite song. "It makes me crazy," she said. "You know they're playing it somewhere, but you have to find it."
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songs
radio
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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33ec271
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Dieting fooled you into thinking you could control your life.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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57cf288
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The window gave onto a view of dove-gray roofs and balconies, each one containing the same cracked flowerpot and sleeping feline. It was as if the entire city of Paris had agreed to abide by a single understated taste. Each neighbor was doing his or her own to keep up standards, which was difficult because the French ideal wasn't clearly delineated like the neatness and greenness of American lawns, but more of a picturesque disrepair. It to..
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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ed3fddd
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It was like autumn, looking at her. it was like driving up north to see the colors.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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21f876a
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There were 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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9283818
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We're all made up of many parts, other halves. Not just me.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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f1b2d66
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Now all the mute objects of my life seem to tell my story, to stretch back in time, if I look closely enough.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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fa838a5
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And in some of the houses, people were getting old and sick and were dying, leaving others to grieve. It was happening all the time, unnoticed, and it was the thing that really mattered. What really mattered in life, what gave it weight, was death.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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3ec5582
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Virgin suicide What was that she cried? No use in stayin' On this holocaust ride She gave me her cherry She's my virgin suicide
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suicide
sex
music
the-virgin-suicides
lyrics
virginity
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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2b7713e
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What if you had faith and performed good works, what if you died and went to heaven, and what if all the people you met there were people you didn't like?
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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87409fe
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All sixteen mentioned her jutting ribs, the insubstantiality of her thighs, and one, who went up to the roof with Lux during a warm winter rain, told us how the basins of her collarbones collected water.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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e519fdb
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For the eternity that Lux Lisbon looked at him, Trip Fontaine looked back, and the love he felt at that moment, truer than all subsequent loves because it never had to survive real life, still plagued him, even now in the desert, with his looks and health wasted. 'You never know what'll set the memory off,' he told us. 'A baby's face. A bell on a cat's collar. Anything.' They didn't exchange a single word. But in the weeks that followed, Tr..
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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0485c16
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Pregnancy humbles husbands. After an initial rush of male pride they quickly recognise the minor role that nature had assigned them in the drama of reproduction.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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3795c8a
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Every letter was a love letter. Of course, as love letters went, this one could have been better. It was not very promising, for instance, that Madeleine claimed not to want to see him for the next half-century.
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love-letter
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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5a2244d
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We listened to them, but it was clear they'd received too much therapy to know the truth.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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1c1dc3b
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Remember that day you said you loved me? Remember that? See, you could do that because you're basically a sane person, who grew up in a loving, sane family. You could take a risk like that. But in my family we didn't go around saying we loved each other. We went around screaming at each other. So what do I do, when you say you love me? I go and undermine it.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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742b059
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If Mitchell was ever going to become a good Christian, he would have to stop disliking people so intensely.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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9789f20
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When you stood between somebody you loved and death, it was hard to be awake and it was hard to sleep.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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e231c9a
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She wasn't all that interested, as a reader, in the reader. She was still partial to that increasingly eclipsed entity: the writer. Madeleine had a feeling that most semiotic theorists had been unpopular as children, often bullied or overlooked, and so had directed their lingering rage onto literature. They wanted to demote the author. They wanted a book, that hard-won, transcendent thing, to be a text, contingent, indeterminate, and open f..
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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fa35048
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She thought a writer should work harder writing a book than she did reading it.
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writing
writing-advice
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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e635e94
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It was amazing how it worked: the tiniest bit of truth made credible the greatest lies.
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truth
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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67dc4f7
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Is there anything as incredible as the love story of your own parents? Anything as hard to grasp as the fact that those two over-the-hill players, permanently on the disabled list, were once in the starting lineup? It's impossible to imagine my father, who in my experience was aroused mainly by the lowering of interest rates, suffering the acute, adolescent passions of the flesh.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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65b64f4
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Yes, you need a passport to prove to the world that you exist. The people at passport control, they cannot look at you and see you are a person. No! They have to look at a little photograph of you. Then they believe you exist.
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philosophy
society
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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fa89fb5
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She had given birth to me and nursed me and brought me up. She had known me before I knew myself and now she had no say in the matter. Life started out one thing and then suddenly turned a corner and became something else.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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a771db9
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And so now, having been born, I'm going to rewind the film, so that my pink blanket flies off, my crib scoots across the floor as my umbilical cord reattaches, and I cry out as I'm sucked back between my mother's legs. She gets really fat again. Then back some more as a spoon stops swinging and a thermometer goes back into its velvet case. Sputnik chases its rocket trail back to the launching pad and polio stalks the land. There's a quick s..
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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533cb66
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They thought depression was like bieng 'depressed'. They thought it was like being in a bad mood, only worse. Therefore, they tried to get him to snap out of it.
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psychology
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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f6e18a4
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The more she thought about it, the more Madeleine understood that extreme solitude didn't just describe the way she was feeling about Leonard. It explained how she'd always felt when she was in love. It explained what love was like and, just maybe, what was wrong with it.
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solitude
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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1db77dd
|
We Greeks get married in circles, to impress upon ourselves the essential matrimonial facts: that to be happy you have to find variety in repetition; that to go forward you have to come back where you began.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |