We knew the pain of winter rushing up your skirt, and the ache of keeping your knees together in class, and how drab and infuriating it was to jump rope while the boys played baseball. We could never understand why the girls cared so much about being mature, or why they felt compelled to compliment each other.
Jeffrey EugenidesEvery letter was a love letter. Of course, as love letters went, this one could have been better. It was not very promising, for instance, that Madeleine claimed not to want to see him for the next half-century.
Jeffrey EugenidesIf Mitchell was ever going to become a good Christian, he would have to stop disliking people so intensely.
Jeffrey EugenidesIt didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.
Jeffrey EugenidesLuxโs frequent forged excuses from phys. Ed. She always used the same method, faking the rigid tโs and bโs of her motherโs signature and then, to distinguish her own handwriting, penning her signature, Lux Lisbon, below, the two beseeching Lโs reaching out for each other over the ditch of the u and barbed-wire x.
Jeffrey Eugenides