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a3f12de
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All of a sudden America wasn't about hamburgers and hot rods anymore. It was about the Mayflower and Plymouth Rock. It was about something that had happened for two minutes four hundred years ago, instead of everything that had happened since. Instead of everything that was happening now!
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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c16a386
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He left in a state of distraction and a winter coat.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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0190dc7
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When asked why she had tried to kill herself, she said only, "It was a mistake."
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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0463845
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To be inclusive you must accommodate different levels of sophistication.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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3b60a27
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Even the air seemed on fire, subtly aflame with energy as it does when you are young, when the synapses are firing wildly and death is far away.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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3c4761d
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our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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5c6babf
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Heartbreak is funny to everyone but the heartbroken.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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e33f122
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Lux's frequent forged excuses from phys. ed. She always used the same method, faking the rigid 's and 's of her mother's signature and then, to distinguish her own handwriting, penning her signature, Lux Lisbon, below, the two beseeching 's reaching out for each other over the ditch of the and barbed-wire .
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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fcc0f68
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Two things mania did were to keep you up all night and to enable nonstop sex: pretty much the definition of college.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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3addba9
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The worst part was that, as the years passed, these memories became, in the way you kept them in a secret box in your head, taking them out every so often to turn them over and over, something like dear possessions. They were the key to your unhappiness. They were the evidence that life wasn't fair. If you weren't a lucky child, you didn't know you weren't lucky until you got older. And then it was all you ever thought about.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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2659528
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Depending on the year or the therapist he was seeing, he'd learned to ascribe just about every facet of his character as a psychological reaction to his parents' fighting: his laziness, his overachieving, his tendency to isolate, his tendency to seduce, his hypochondria, his sense of invulnerability, his self-loathing, his narcissism.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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0bb3871
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They were moving along like that, each cupping a hold of the other. 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 beautiful and fortunate, of everybody who got what they wanted in life and so remained unremarkable.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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c34faf1
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Three times a day Petrovich showed up at the nurse's office for his injections, always using the hypodermic needle himself like the most craven of junkies, though after shooting up he would play the concert piano in the auditorium with astounding artistry, as though insulin were the elixir of genius.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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af02a7d
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The following doodle: a girl with pigtails is bent under the weight of a gigantic boulder. Her cheeks puff out, and her rounded lips expel steam. One widening steam cloud contains the word Pressure, darkly retraced.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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ff9a594
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It was as if, before she`d met him, her blood had circulated grayly around her body, and now ir was all oxygenated and red. She was petrified of becoming the half-alive person she`d been before.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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a9ef681
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What my could never understand about America was why everyone pretended to be happy all the time.
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americans
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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f0421ae
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Anyone have some mints or some gum?" Bonnie asked. No one did, and she turned to Joe Hill Conley. She scrutinized him a moment, then, using her fingers, combed his part over to the left side. "That looks better," she said. Nearly two decades later, the little hair he has left remains parted by Bonnie's invisible hand." --
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love
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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b4e99d4
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I'm quickly approaching the moment of discovery: of myself by myself, which was something I knew all along and yet didn't know; and the discovery by poor half-blind Dr. Philobosian of what he'd failed to notice at my birth and continued to miss during every annual physical thereafter; and the discovery by my parents of what kind of child they'd given birth to (answer: the same child, only different); and finally, the discovery of the mutate..
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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5ba0daf
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Adolescents tend to seek love where they can find it.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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d96bc76
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My goal in life is to become an adjective," Leonard said. "People would go around saying, 'That was so Bankheadian.' Or, 'A little too Bankheadian for my taste."
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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57d54cf
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He hadn't suffered the eternity of the ring about to be picked up, didn't know the heart rush of hearing that incomparable voice suddenly linked with his own, the sense it gave of being too close to even see her, of being actually inside her ear.
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love
phone-calls
teenager
phone
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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93c1f42
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Mr. Lisbon had the feeling that he didn't know who she was, that children were only strangers you agreed to live with.
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the-virgin-suicides
strangers
parents
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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81308e6
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O Earth, lie heavily upon her eyes; Seal her sweet eyes weary of watching Earth; Lie close around her; leave no room for mirth With its harsh laughter, nor for sound of sighs. She hath no questions, she hath no replies.
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suicide
earth
poem
poetry
christianity
death
the-virgin-suicides
rebirth
funeral
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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eb667f7
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Once you've visited the underworld, you never forget the way back.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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851381a
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For our own part, we learned a great deal about the techniques of love, and because we didn't know the words to denote what we saw, we had to make up our own. That was why we spoke of "yodeling in the canyon" and "tying the tube," of "groaning in the pit," "slipping the turtle's head," and "chewing the stinkweed." Years later, when we lost our own virginities, we resorted in our panic to pantomiming Lux's gyrations on the roof so long ago; ..
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memories
virgins
virginity
sex-education
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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150ebb9
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Some cities have fallen into ruin and some are built upon ruins but others contain their own ruins while still growing.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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6dd6027
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Jerome was sliding and climbing on top of me and it felt like it had the night before, like a crushing weight. So do boys and men announce their intentions. They cover you like a sarcophagus lid. And call it love.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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a82d485
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Eating is natural. Gaining weight is your choice.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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7a6f248
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She leaned toward him and said in a quiet voice, "Are you Christian?" Mitchell hesitated to answer. The worst thing about religion was religious people."
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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5078848
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When we asked him to sum up his impression of the girls' emotional state at that point, he said, "Buffeted but not broken."
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suicide
the-virgin-suicides
mental-illness
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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e8728cc
|
Great discoveries, whether of silk or gravity, are always windfalls. They happen to people loafing under trees.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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620e16e
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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 traincar 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 mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age." --
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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b4236f5
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Even our parents seemed to agree more and more with the television version of things, listening to the reporters' inanities as though they could tell us the truth about our own lives.
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philosophical
the-virgin-suicides
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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2d23fa8
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Dukakis." A name with more than two vowels in it running for President! The last time that had happened was Eisenhower (who looked good on a tank). Generally speaking, Americans like their presidents to have no more than two vowels. Truman. Johnson. Nixon. Clinton. If they have more than two vowels (Reagan), they can have no more than two syllables. Even better is one syllable and one vowel: Bush. Had to do that twice."
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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0d3eaa3
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This, Tolstoy says, is our human predicament: we're the man clutching the branch. Death awaits us. There is no escape. And so we distract ourselves by licking whatever drops of honey come within our reach.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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8ddb5bc
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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?
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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2c9dfee
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the novel had reached its apogee with the marriage plot and had never recovered from its disappearance. In the days when success in life had depended on marriage, and marriage had depended on money, novelists had had a subject to write about. The great epics sang of war, the novel of marriage. Sexual equality, good for women, had been bad for the novel. And divorce had undone it completely. What would it matter whom Emma married if she coul..
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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7989995
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She lost much of her appetite. At night, an invisible hand kept shaking her awake every few hours. Grief was physiological, a disturbance of the blood. Sometimes a whole minute would pass in nameless dread - the bedside clock ticking, the blue moonlight coating the window like glue - before she`d remember the brutal fact that had caused it.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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ae8ce9b
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Mitchell had answered that, as far as he understood them, mystical experiences were significant only to the extent that they changed a person's conception of reality, and if that changed conception led to a change in behavior and action, a loss of ego.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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d79291b
|
But this was the thought of a depressive. An aspiring depressive, at the time. That was the odd thing about Leonard's disease, the almost pleasurable way it began. At first his dark moods were closer to melancholy than to despair. There was something enjoyable about wandering around the city alone, feeling forlorn. There was even a sense of superiority, of being right, in not liking the things other kids liked.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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94663d9
|
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 traincar 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 mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age."
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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fad5094
|
Mr. da Silva had a relevant quotation for everything that happened to him and in this way evaded real life.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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122edc5
|
There had never been a funeral in our town before, at least not during our lifetimes. The majority of dying had happened during the Second World War when we didn't exist and our fathers were impossibly skinny young men in black-and-white photographs--dads on jungle airstrips, dads with pimples and tattoos, dads with pinups, dads who wrote love letters to the girls who would become our mothers, dads inspired by K rations, loneliness and glan..
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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4f9dcea
|
Who are you, anyway?" "Just someone who knows, from personal experience, how attractive it can be to think you can save somebody else by loving them." "I could have sworn we just met," Madeleine said. "And that you don't know anything about me." Henry stood up. With a slightly offended air but undiminished confidence, he said, "People save themselves." He left her with that to think about."
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Jeffrey Eugenides |