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2a6961b
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Aphrodite put off her famous belt, in which all the charms of love are woven, potency, desire, lovely whispers, and the force of seduction, which takes away foresight and judgment even from the most reasonable people.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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7a7a385
|
Here's a question I still can't answer: Did I see through the male tricks because I was destined to scheme that way myself? Or do girls see through the tricks, too, and just pretend not to notice?
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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9cf739e
|
Discussing it later, many of us felt we suffered a mental dislocation at that moment, which only grew worse through the course of the remaining deaths. The prevailing symptom of this state was an inability to recall any sound. Truck doors slammed silently; Lux's mouth screamed silently; and the street, the creaking tree limbs, the streetlight clicking different colors, the electric buzz of the pedestrian crossing box - all these usually cla..
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silence
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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63a8163
|
We realized that the version of the world [our parents] rendered for us was not the world they really believed in, and that for all their caretaking and bitching about crabgrass they didn't give a damn about lawns.
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growing-up
parents
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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4b5c2ef
|
When it comes to love, there are a million theories to explain it. But when it comes to love stories, things are simpler. A love story can never be about full posession. The happy marriage, the requited love, the desire that never dims-- these are lucky eventualities 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, n..
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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b7b9354
|
And did I mention how in summer the streets of Smyrna were lined with baskets of rose petals? And how everyone in the city could speak French, Italian, Greek, Turkish, English, and Dutch? And did I tell you about the famous figs, brought in by camel caravan and dumped onto the ground, huge piles of pulpy fruit lying in the dirt, with dirty women steeping them in salt water and children squatting to defecate behind the clusters? Did I mentio..
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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2d42316
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and the love he felt at that moment, truer than all subsequent loves because it never had to survive.
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true-love
virgin-suicides
survival
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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783c934
|
Mr. Lisbon knew his parental and neighborly duty entailed putting the retainer in a Ziploc bag, calling the Kriegers, and telling them their expensive orthodontal device was in safe keeping. Acts like theses -- simple, humane, conscientious, forgiving -- held life together. Only a few days earlier he would have been able to perform them. But now he took the retainer and dropped it in the toiler. He pressed the handle. The retainer, jostled ..
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grief
society
parents
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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32b6754
|
She was the still point in the turning world.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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913fd4b
|
Sixty trillion years ago a god-scientist dug a hole through the earth, filled it with dynamite and blew the earth in two. The smaller of these two pieces became the moon.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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bd346f1
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At that moment Mr. Lisbon had the feeling that he didn't know who she was, that children were only strangers you agreed to live with, and he reached out in order to meet her for the first time.
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family
disassociation
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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4fee0aa
|
I do not think the patient truly meant to end her life. Her act was a cry for help.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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1b1c0ed
|
Leonard's being up early constituted a new change in his sleeping patterns, was part of the former change in his sleeping patterns, or indicated a beneficial development. She didn't know if his perfectionism canceled out his loss of ambition, or if they were two sides of the same coin. 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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a62a7cd
|
and left no doubt that Cecilia had done violence to herself.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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22d52c1
|
Is there anything as incredible as the love story of your own parents?
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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de65879
|
Martinis in a can, Callie. We live in an age of wonders.
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wonders
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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98d61ff
|
You're a stone fox," he said, and took off."
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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5f4ad49
|
To her surprise, Madeleine found herself contemplating this proposal. Why not tell her parents everything, curl up in the backseat of the car, and let them take her home? She could move into her old bedroom, with the sleigh bed and the Madeline wallpaper. 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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7151714
|
Tessie allowed Milton to press his clarinet to her skin and fill her body with music. At first it only tickled her. But after a while the notes spread deeper into her body. She felt the vibrations penetrate her muscles, pulsing in waves, until they rattled her bones and made her inner organs hum.
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music
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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532e0c7
|
But by the time Madeleine reached the age that Alwyn had been then, she realized that her sister's iconoclasm and liberationist commitments had just been part of a trend. Alwyn had done the things she had done and voiced the political opinions she'd voiced because all her friends were acting and talking the same way.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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94a1df5
|
In the Orthodox Church, we don't go for partial immersion; no sprinkling, no forehead dabbing for us. In order to be reborn, you have to be buried first, so under the water I went.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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e4ccd1c
|
Desdemona, mourning her parents, was still imprisoned by the past. And so she stood on the mountain, looking down at the emancipated city, and felt cheated by her ability to feel happy by everybody else.
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sadness
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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723d555
|
Mi meta en la vida es llegar a ser un adjetivo -dijo-. Que la gente vaya por ahi diciendo: <>, o <>. -Bankheadiano suena bien -dijo Madeleine. -Es mejor que bankheadesco. -O bankheadino. -La terminacion en <> es horrible la mires por donde la mires. Hay joyciano, shakesperiano, faulkneriano. Pero en <>. ?Quien hay por ahi que sea algo terminado en <>? -?T..
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anagrama
trama-nupcial
snob
eugenides
|
Jeffrey Eugenides |
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96f393f
|
My change from girl to boy was far less dramatic than the distance anybody travels from infancy to adulthood.
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life
gender
|
Jeffrey Eugenides |
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9358883
|
Early June, Providence, Rhode Island, the sun up for almost two hours already, lighting up the pale bay and the smokestacks of the Narragansett Electric factory, rising like the sun on the Brown University seal emblazoned on all the pennants and banners draped up over campus, a sun with a sagacious face, representing knowledge. But this sun--the one over Providence--was doing the metaphorical sun one better, because the founders of the univ..
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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424f193
|
Up until recently, Milton thought of Tessie as his prim cousin. Whenever one of his friends expressed interest in her, Milton told them to give up the idea. "That's honey from the icebox," he said, As Artie Shaw might have. "Cold sweets don't spread."
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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9346108
|
As he responded to the essay questions, Mitchell kept bending his answers toward their practical application. He wanted to know why he was here, and how to live. It was the perfect way to end your college career. Education had finally led Mitchell out into life.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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1a20e7f
|
Lefty, who'd been observing all the ways Greece had been handed down to America, arrived now at where the transmission stopped. In other words: the future. He stepped off to meet it. Desdemona, having no alternative, followed.
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lefty
greek
greece
|
Jeffrey Eugenides |
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69061bf
|
but the corset had the odd power of making her seem somehow more naked; it turned her into a forbidden, armored creature with a soft side inside he had to hunt for.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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7228dc0
|
They made us participate in their own madness, because we couldn't help but retrace their steps, rethink their thoughts, and see that none of them led to us.
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suicide
|
Jeffrey Eugenides |
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ac45f04
|
Just when she'd got her head on straight, her body started falling apart.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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b3ee086
|
She didn't want to be liberated from her emotions, but to have their importance confirmed.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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f32a7d0
|
I mean, in the end it wasn't up to me. The big things never are. Birth, I mean, and death. And love. And what love bequeaths to use before we're born.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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97a7a22
|
According to an ancient Chinese legend, one day in the year 240 B.C., Princess Si Ling-chi was sitting under a mulberry tree when a silkworm cocoon fell into her teacup. When she tried to remove it, she noticed that the cocoon had begun to unravel in the hot liquid. She handed the loose end to her maidservant and told her to walk. The servant went out of the princess's chamber, and into the palace courtyard, and through the palace gates, an..
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privilege
silk
story-telling
luck
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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2e790ce
|
He had the wit of a store mannequin.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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e2e79cb
|
The sky grew darker, and the light abandoned the daytime, so that we found ourselves always moving in a timeless murk, the only way to discern the hour the taste of sour burps, toothpaste in the morning, redolent in the afternoon of the jellied beef of school cafetetria meals
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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7ed8127
|
I am living through days as happy as those God keeps for his chosen people; and whatever becomes of me, I can never say that I have not tasted the purest joys of life.
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life
|
Jeffrey Eugenides |
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14cea79
|
There is a small window of opportunity for freckled girls to tan.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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e71f0f2
|
Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights...How wonderful it was when one sentence followed logically from the sentence before!...There were going to be people in it. Something was going to happen to them in a place resembling the world.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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91dfefc
|
Madeline began hearing people saying "Derrida". She heard them saying "Lyotard" and "Foucault" and "Deleuze" and "Baudrillard". That most of these people were those she instinctually disapproved of- upper-middle-class kids who wore Doc Martens and anarchist symbols- made Madeline dubious about the value of their enthusiasm."
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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d979f0b
|
A seven-year-old girl can take only so many walks with her grandfather.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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0577ad6
|
There was nowhere to go that wouldn't be me.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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f62b55e
|
If they were going to kill you, would they knock?
|
|
murder
burgaler
if-they-were-going-to-kill-you
would-they-knock
|
Jeffrey Eugenides |
|
5fba35b
|
My grandfather's short employ at the Ford Motor Company marked the only time any Stephanides has ever worked in the automotive industry. Instead of cars, we could become manufacturers of hamburger platters and Greek salads, industrialists of spanakopita and grilled cheese sandwiches, technocrats of rice pudding and banana cream pie. Our assembly line was the grill; our heavy machinery, the soda fountain.
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Jeffrey Eugenides |