Quotes from book

Middlesex

“The essential matrimonial facts: that to be happy you have to find variety in repetition; that to go forward you have to come back to where you begin.”

“This can't be true but I remember it.”

“Regret, already sogging me down, burst its dam. It seeped into my legs, it pooled in my heart.”

“It was like autumn, looking at her. it was like driving up north to see the colors.”

“But in the end it wasn't up to me. The bigs things never are. Birth, I mean, and death. And love. And what love bequeaths to us before we're born.”

“Whereas I, even now, persist in believing that these black marks on white paper bear the greatest significance, that if I keep writing I might be able to catch the rainbow of consciousness in a jar.”

“The television replaced the sound of conversation that was missing from my grandparents' lives.”

“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.”

“There was nowhere I could go that wouldn't be you.”

“Can you see me? All of me? Probably not. No one ever really has.”

“Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling.”

“I went into the desert to forget about you. But the sand was the color of your hair. The desert sky was the color of your eyes. There was nowhere I could go that wouldn't be you.”

“Pregnancy humbles husbands. After an initial rush of male pride they quickly recognise the minor role that nature had assigned them in the drama of reproduction.”

“Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.”

“The only way we know it's true is that we both dreamed it. That's what reality is. It's a dream everyone has together.”

“It was one of those humid days when the atmosphere gets confused. Sitting on the porch, you could feel it: the air wishing it was water.”

“The mind self-edits. The mind airbrushes. It's a different thing to be inside a body than outside. From outside, you can look, inspect, compare. From inside there is no comparison.”

“So do boys and men announce their intentions. They cover you like a sarcophagus lid. And call it love.”

“Now all the mute objects of my life seem to tell my story, to stretch back in time, if I look closely enough.”