"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 dam..."
- Jeffrey Eugenides
"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."
"College wasn't like the real world. In the real world people dropped names based on their renown. In college, people dropped names based on their obscurity."
"in Detroit, in July of 1967, what happened was no less than a guerrilla uprising.The Second American Revolution."
"They didn't exchange a single word. But in the weeks that followed, Trip spent his days wandering the halls, hoping for Lux to appear, the most naked person with clothes on he had ever seen. Even in s..."
"If they were going to kill you, would they knock?"
"This was a characteroloical prelude, but it wasn’t chemical or somatic. It was the anatomy of melancholy, not the anatomy of his brain."
"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."
"Listening to Leonard, Madeleine felt impoverished by her happy childhood. She never wondered why she acted the way she did, or what effect her parents had had on her personality. Being fortunate had d..."
"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. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all exist..."