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2cc0c40
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Dr. Luce introduced the concept of "periphescence". The word itself means nothing; Luce made it up to avoid any etymological associations. The state of periphescence, however, is well known. It denotes the first fever of human pair bonding. It causes giddiness, elation, a tickling on the chest wall, the urge to climb a balcony on the rope of the beloved's hair. Periphescence denotes the inital drugged and happy bedtime where you sniff your ..
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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a6bf587
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Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights. What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth century novel. There were going to be people in it. Something was going to happen to them in a place resembling the world. Then too there were lots of weddings in Wharton and Austen. There were all kinds of irresistible gloomy men.
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reading
nineteenth-century
victorians
semiotics
narrative
plot
novels
literary-theory
postmodernism
literary-criticism
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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fdbfdf7
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My house fly theory is related to my theory about why time seems to go faster as you get older." "Why's that?" the girl asked. "It's proportional," Leonard explained. "When you're five, you've only been alive a couple thousand days. But by the time you're fifty, you've lived around twenty thousand days. So a day when you're five seems longer because it's a greater percentage of the whole."
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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bd2ea3b
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that since Cecilia's suicide, the Lisbons could hardly wait for night to forget themselves in sleep.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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8611ea0
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Whereas my grandfather was getting used to a much more terrifying reality. Holding my hand to keep his balance, as trees and bushes made strange, sliding movements in his peripheral vision, Lefty was confronting the possibility that consciousness was a biological accident. Though he'd never been religious, he realized now that he'd always believed in the soul, in a force of personality that survived death. But as his mind continued to waver..
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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025b2d7
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What were he and his friends doing, really, other than hanging from a branch, sticking their tongues out to catch the sweetness? He thought about the people he knew, with their excellent young bodies, their summerhouses, their cool clothes, their potent drugs, their liberalism, their orgasms, their haircuts. Everything they did was either pleasurable in itself or engineered to bring pleasure down the line. Even the people he knew who were "..
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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3cf2ccc
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Don't waste your time on life.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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2c81400
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German wasn't good for conversation because you had to wait to the end of the sentence for the verb, and so couldn't interrupt.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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9ba1a6e
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Her eyes watered and she was a foot taller than any of her sisters, mostly because of the length of her neck which would one day hang from the end of a rope.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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2aa12c7
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You don't understand me. I'm a teenager. I've got problems!
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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c1477b3
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Chunks of his life fell away, so that while we were moving ahead in time, he was moving back.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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02e09e4
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But now, Mr. Bates didn't scream or try to get the truck's license plate, nor did Mrs. Bates, who had once wept when we set off firecrackers in her state-fair tulips - they said nothing, and our parents said nothing, so that we sensed how ancient they were, how accustomed to trauma, depressions, and wars. We realized that the version of the world that they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in, and that for all their car..
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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3af82b4
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We knew the pain of winter wind rushing up your skirt, and the ache of keeping your knees together in class, and how drab and infuriating it was to jump rope while the boys played baseball. 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 ..
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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3b06515
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My family suffered. My hair turned up in every corner, every drawer, every meal. Even in the rice puddings Tessie made, covering each little bowl with wax paper before putting it away in the fridge--even into these prophylactically secure desserts my hair found its way! Jet black hairs wound themselves around bars of soap. They lay pressed like flower stems between the pages of books. They turned up in eyeglass cases, birthday cards, once--..
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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0295f19
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It was something every child knew how to do, maintain a direct and full connection with the world. Somehow you forgot about it as you grew up, and had to learn it again.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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f901444
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You went out with a girl at first because the sheer sight of her made you weak in the knees. You fell in love and were desperate not to let her get away. And yet the more you thought about her, the less you knew who she was. The hope was that love transcended all differences. That was the hope.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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12e74c3
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The humming of my parents' voices from behind my bedroom wall, which throughout my childhood had filled me with a sense of security, had now become a source of anxiety and panic.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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7d36208
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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.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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8b63bef
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That was the deal basically: catatonia without; frenzy within
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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754fb05
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He had the feeling that there was something physically behind his eyes, blocking the light.
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mental-illness
mental-health
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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83777d8
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There is no evidence against genetic determinism more persuasive than the children of the rich.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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12da3d0
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A changeableness, too, as if beneath my visible face there was another, having second thoughts.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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b2a2ece
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We lost them in the vastness of their dresses and found them again, squeezed the pulp of their bodies and inhaled the perfume of their exertion. A few of us grew brave enough to insert our legs between theirs and to press our agony against them.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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fc90550
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She was a large, disordered woman, like a child's drawing that didn't stay within the lines.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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2265ef3
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It was morning by the clock but deepest nighttime in his body.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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7e99ce5
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Normality wasn't normal. It couldn't be. If normality were normal, everybody could leave it alone. They could sit back and let normality manifest itself.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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2d79aa8
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At night the cries of cats making love or fighting, their caterwauling in the dark, told us that the world was pure emotion, flung back and forth among its creatures, the agony of the one-eyed Siamese no different from that of the Lisbon girls, and even the trees plunged in feeling.
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virgin-suicides
anticipation
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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f594a81
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Whenever we got a glimpse, their faces looked indecently revealed, as though we were used to seeing women in veils.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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383b8e0
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But that was in the days when they expected perils to come from without, and nothing made less sense by that time than a survival room buried in a house itself becoming one big coffin.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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ce51c9f
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I'm the final clause in a periodic sentence, and that sentence begins a long time ago, in another language, and you to read it from the beginning to get to the end, which is my arrival.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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d8ae2e3
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Chucking her under her 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-old girl."
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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6e1c975
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It was the custom in those days for passengers leaving for America to bring balls of yarn on deck. Relatives on the pier held the loose ends. As the "Giulia" blew its horn and moved away from the dock, a few hundred strings of yarn stretched across the water. People shouted farewells, waved furiously, held up babies for last looks they wouldn't remember. Propellers churned; handkerchiefs fluttered, and, up on deck, the balls of yarn began t..
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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05ec204
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College feminists made fun of skyscrapers, saying they were phallic symbols. They said the same thing about space rockets, even though, if you stopped to think about it, rockets were shaped the way they were not because of phallocentrism but because of aerodynamics. Would a vagina-shaped Apollo 11 have made it to the moon? Evolution had created the penis. It was a useful structure for getting certain things done. And if it worked for the pi..
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phallocentrism
penises
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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b8a5b19
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Children learn to speak Male or Female the way they learn to speak English or French.
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learning
female
english
male
french
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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b7f8996
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Sourmelina's secret (as Aunt Zo put it): 'Lina was one of those women they named the island after.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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713dc2a
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In the end he became as fragmentary as the poems of Sappho he never succeeded in restoring, and finally one morning he looked up into the face of the woman who'd been the greatest love of his life and failed to recognize her. And then there was another kind of blow inside his head; blood pooled in his brain for the last time, washing even the last fragments of his self away.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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11d0911
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He didn't understand how she had bewitched him, nor why having done so she promptly forgot his existence, and in desperate moods he asked his mirror why the only girl he was crazy about was the only girl not crazy about him.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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a1a9154
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Parents are supposed to pass down physical traits to their children, but it's my belief that all sorts of other things get passed down, too: motifs, scenarios, even fates.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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72b8bfb
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We all received invitations, made by hand from construction paper, with balloons containing our names in Magic Marker. Our amazement at being formally invited to a house we had only visited in our bathroom fantasies was so great that we had to compare one another's invitations before we believed it. It was thrilling to know that the Lisbon girls knew our names, that their delicate vocal cords had pronounced their syllables, and that they me..
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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1fd1bbe
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I saw the movie," he said. "I know what it's about. Listen to this. When girls get to be about twelve or so"--he leaned toward us--"their tits bleed."
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women
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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58526aa
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It was probably true that he objectified women. He thought about them all the time, didn't he? He looked at them a lot. And didn't all this thinking and looking involve their breasts and lips and legs? Female human beings were objects of the most intense interest and scrutiny on Mitchell's part. And yet he didn't think that a word like objectification covered the way these alluring - but intelligent! - creatures made him feel. What Mitchell..
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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4561ed8
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Household objects lost meaning. A bedside clock became a hunk of molded plastic, telling something called time, in a world marking its passage for some reason.
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time
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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618f1e8
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It seemed like we were supposed to feel sorry for everything that ever happened, ever.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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dc35684
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between addiction and depression? Depression a lot worse. Depression ain't something you just get OFF of. You can't get CLEAN from depression. Depression be like a bruise that never goes away. A bruise in your MIND. You just got to be careful not to touch where it hurts. It always be there, though.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |