Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights. What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth century novel. There were going to be people in it. Something was going to happen to them in a place resembling the world. Then too there were lots of weddings in Wharton and Austen. There were all kinds of irresistible gloomy men.
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 EugenidesFor 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.
Jeffrey Eugenides