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.
Jeffrey EugenidesTags: growing-up
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.
Jeffrey EugenidesTags: anticipation anthropology virgin-suicides
For the eternity that Lux Lisbon looked at him, Trip Fontaine looked back, and the love he felt at that moment, truer than all subsequent loves because it never had to survive real life, still plagued him, even now in the desert, with his looks and health wasted. 'You never know what'll set the memory off,' he told us. 'A baby's face. A bell on a cat's collar. Anything.'
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.
Tags: love
It's often said that a traumatic experience early in life marks a person forever, pulls her out of line, saying, "Stay there. Don't move.
Jeffrey EugenidesTags: childhood traumatic-experiences
If you try to write posthumously, however, fashion doesn’t apply. You step off the catwalk, ignoring this season’s trends and resigning yourself to being unfashionable and possibly unnoticed, at least for a while. As Kurt Woolf, Kafka’s first publisher in Germany, wrote to him after Kafka’s book tanked, “You and we know that it is generally just the best and most valuable things that do not find their echo immediately.” Fashion is the attempt to evade that principle: to be the echo of someone else’s success and, therefore, to create nothing that might create an echo of its own.
Jeffrey EugenidesTags: the-new-yorker page-turner posthumous
Tessio Zizmo had been a virgin when she married Milton Stephanides at the age of 22. Their engagement,which coincided with the Second World War, had been a chaste affair. My mother was proud of the way she'd managed to simultaneously kindle and snuff my father's flame,keeping him at a low burn for the duration of a global cataclysm.... She didn't surrender until after Japan had.
Jeffrey EugenidesTags: marriage second-world-war
At one point, a girl who looked to be in her early twenties, with a Joan of Arc haircut, passed right in front of the glass. When Mitchell looked at her, the girl did an amazing thing: she looked back. She met his gaze with frank sexual meaning. Not that she "wanted" to have sex with him, necessarily. Only that she was happy to acknowledge, on this late-summer evening, that he was a man and she a woman, and if he found her attractive, that was all right with her. No American girl had ever looked at Mitchell like that.
Deanie was right: Europe was a nice spot.
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.
Jeffrey EugenidesIt 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 led Mitchell out into life.
Jeffrey EugenidesShe 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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