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c57a417
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Almost overnight it became laughable to read writers like Cheever or Updike, who wrote about the suburbia Madeleine and most of her friends had grown up in, in favor of reading the Marquis de Sade, who wrote about anally deflowering virgins in eighteenth-century France. The reason de Sade was preferable was that his shocking sex scenes weren't about sex but politics. They were therefore anti-imperialist, anti-bourgeois, anti-patriarchal, an..
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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47fecf2
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In those days you could identify a person's nationality by smell. Lying on her back with eyes closed, Desdemona could detect the telltale oniony aroma of a Hungarian woman on her right, and the raw-meat smell of an Armenian on her left. (And they, in turn, could peg Desdemona as a Hellene by her aroma of garlic and yogurt.)
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smell
nationality
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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4f1d28b
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This whole country's stolen.
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usa
theft
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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61bf66c
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I understood at those times what I was leaving behind: the solidarity of a shared biology. Women know what it means to have a body. They understand its difficulties and frailties, its glories and pleasures. Men think their bodies are theirs alone. They tend them in private, even in public.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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154f750
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A girl's not a watermelon you plug a hole in to see if it's sweet.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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ddeb5db
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Phyllida's hair was where her power resided. It was expensively set into a smooth dome, like a band shell for the presentation of that long-running act, her face.
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simile
personal-appearance
faces
face
hair
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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cdbbc32
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The last thing the hockey ball symbolized was Time itself, the unstoppability of it, the way we're chained to our bodies, which are chained to Time.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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baa9ea0
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Pregnancy made her feel too much like an animal. It was embarrassing to be so publicly colonized.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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1e65f7e
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Aloft, he looked frail, diseased, and temperamental, as we expected a European to look.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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79e575e
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Just someone who knows, from personal experience, how attractive it can be to think you can save somebody else by loving them...People don't save other people. People save themselves.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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b567edb
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Olivia lit a cigarette and said, "God, if I worried about running into old boyfriends, I couldn't go anywhere!"
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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79e42c9
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Now I've given up any hope of lasting fame or literary perfection. I don't care if I write a great book anymore, but just one which, whatever its flaws, will leave a record of my impossible life.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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d3e3499
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He wanted women to love him, all women, beginning with his mother and going on from there. Therefore, whenever any woman got mad at him, he felt maternal disapproval crashing down upon his shoulders, as if he'd been a naughty boy.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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efa1490
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Then one Sunday morning, before winter break, Abby's boyfriend, Whitney, materialized at their kitchen table, reading something called "Of Grammatology". When Madeleine asked what the book was about, she was given to understand by Whitney that the idea of a book being "about" something was exactly what this book was against, and that, if it was "about" anything, then it was about the need to stop thinking of books as being about things."
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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e807224
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But as I peeked at my brother's inert body....I was aware only of what a strange thing it was to be male. Society discriminated against women, no question. But what about the discrimination of being sent war? Which sex was really thought to be expendable.
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war
gender-based-discrimination
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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8a0d27c
|
I went to church. It didn't help. In those days that was the best place to meet a girlfriend. In church! All of us praying to be different.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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aa05082
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Here it comes, I thought. The first ex-boyfriend had been summoned. Soon the rest would follow. They would file around the table, presenting their deficiencies, telling of their addictions, their cheating hearts... But that didn't happen with Julie. This was because Julie isn't husband-hunting. So she didn't have to interview me for the job.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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b44ead1
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Shit. What have kids got to be worried about now? If they want trouble, they should go live in Bangladesh.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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b11730a
|
His lost look of a man who realized that all this dying was going to be the only life he ever had.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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15a77f9
|
In between calls, she lay on her side, thinking about calling.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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612dab9
|
She was always saying, 'Fuck this school,' or 'I can't wait until I get out of here.' But so did lots of kids.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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73901f9
|
Segun mi experiencia, las emociones no pueden describirse con una sola palabra. <>, <>, <>, esos terminos no me dicen nada. La mejor prueba de que el lenguaje es patriarcal quiza sea que simplifica demasiado los sentimientos. Me gustaria tener a mi disposicion emociones hibridas, complejas, construcciones germanicas encadenadas, como <>. O esta otra: <
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emociones
middlesex
pulitzer
eugenides
sentimientos
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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5b47f2b
|
It was as if her own heart had been surgically removed from her body and was being kept at a remote location, still connected to her and pumping blood through her veins, but exposed to dangers she couldn't see: her heart in a box somewhere, in the open air, unprotected.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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609bb52
|
Dear Mom and Dad, I know you're only trying to do what's best for me, but I don't think anyone knows for sure what's best. I love you and don't want to be a problem, so I've decided to go away. I know you'll say I'm not a problem, but I know I am. If you want to know why I'm doing this, you should ask Dr. Luce, who is a big liar! I am not a girl. I'm a boy. That's what I found out today. So I'm going where no one knows me. Everyone in Gross..
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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38482b5
|
This is my country,' Lefty said, and to prove it, he did a very American thing: he reached under the counter and produced a pistol.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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b082bbb
|
Given the choice, a yeast cell's ideal state is to be diploid. But if it's in an environment with a lack of nutrients, you know what happens? The diploids break into haploids again. Solitary little haploids. Because, in a crisis, it's easier to survive as a single cell.
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survival
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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272ae5d
|
Pay no attention to the terrors that visit you in the night. The psyche is at its lowest ebb then, unable to defend itself. The desolation that envelops you feels like truth, but isn't. It's just mental fatigue masquerading as insight.
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fear
fresh-complaint
psyche
food-for-thought
night
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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945b438
|
He was filled with embarrassment: embarrassment for the human race, its preoccupation with money, it love of swindle.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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a3e994b
|
She used a line from Trollope's Barchester Towers as an epigraph:"There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel."
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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0f3781f
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The matter with us is you.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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4fdf068
|
every now and then he would tilt his head back so that his sunglasses reflected sky, and would say, "I love her." Every time he said it he seemed delivered of a profundity that amazed him, as though he had coughed up a pearl."
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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01a6a81
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But in 1922 it was still a new thing to be a machine.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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baae086
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Parties bring my misantrophy into focus.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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ea76a13
|
It was like that Talking Head song. ,,And you may ask yourself, 'How did I get here?' ... And you may tell yourself, 'This is not my beautiful house. And you may tell yourself, 'This is not my beautiful wife' ". As he responded to the essay questions, Mitchell kept bending his answers toward their practical applications. He wanted to know why he was here, and how to live. It was perfect way to end your college career. Education had finally ..
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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e513a31
|
As they were walking, a beggar came up, holding his hand out and crying, "Baksheesh! Baksheesh!" Mike kept on going but Mitchell stopped. Digging into his pocket, he pulled out twenty paise and placed it in the beggar's dirty hand. Mike said, "I used to give to beggars when I first came here. But then I realized, it's hopeless. It never stops." "Jesus said you should give to whoever asks you," Mitchell said. "Yeah, well," Mike said, "obviou..
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poverty
jesus
calcutta
charity
poor
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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0b236aa
|
Her head appears to be on fire but that is only a trick of the light. It was June 13, eighty-three degrees out, under sunny skies.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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f68c215
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We had rarely seen our fathers in work boots before, toiling in the earth and wielding brand-new root clippers. They struggled with the fence, bent over like Marines hoisting the flag on Iwo Jima. It was the greatest show of common effort we could remember in our neighborhood, all those lawyers, doctors, and mortgage bankers locked arm in arm in the trench, with our mothers bringing out orange Kool-Aid, and for a moment our century was nobl..
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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9d215b4
|
It is perhaps in reading a love story (or in writing one) that we can simultaneously partake of the ecstasy and agony of being in love without paying a crippling emotional price. I offer this book, then, as a cure for lovesickness and an antidote to adultery. Read these love stories in the safety of your single bed. Let everybody else suffer.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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c77e74f
|
Dr. Philbosian smelled like an old couch, of hair oil and spilled soup, of unscheduled naps.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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a424490
|
Some people need a picture. Any great religion has to be inclusive. And to be inclusive you have to accommodate different levels of sophistication.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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1e192d5
|
At the time, infatuated with Nietzsche (and half asleep), Leonard didn't want to get into this argument, the truth of which wasn't that all religions were equally valid but that they were equally nonsensical.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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da06a48
|
and you can feel it in the air, they way the air has somehow been keeping score.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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fac7f0e
|
Just like ice, lives crack, too. Personalities. Identities. Jimmy Zizmo, crouching over the Packard's wheel has already changed past understanding.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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2be1447
|
Somebody out of touch with reality, when she jumped she probably thought she'd fly.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |