Middlesex

by

Jeffrey Eugenides

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Book 1: The Silver Spoon Quotes

I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.

Related Characters: Cal/lie Stephanides (speaker)
Page Number: 3
Explanation and Analysis:

Sing now, O Muse, of the recessive mutation on my fifth chromosome! Sing how it bloomed two and a half centuries ago on the slopes of Mount Olympus, while the goats bleated and the olives dropped. Sing how it passed down through nine generations, gathering invisibly within the polluted pool of the Stephanides family. And sing how Providence, in the guise of a massacre, sent the gene flying again; how it blew like a seed across the sea to America, where it drifted through our industrial rains until it fell to earth in the fertile soil of my mother’s own midwestern womb.

Sorry if I get a little Homeric at times. That’s genetic, too.

Related Characters: Cal/lie Stephanides (speaker), Theodora “Tessie” Stephanides
Related Symbols: The Recessive Gene
Page Number: 4
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 1: The Silk Road Quotes

Traveling made it easier. Sailing across the ocean among half a thousand perfect strangers conveyed an anonymity in which my grandparents could re-create themselves. The driving spirit on the Giulia was self-transformation. Staring out to sea, tobacco farmers imagined themselves as race car drivers, silk dyers as Wall Street tycoons, millinery girls as fan dancers in the Ziegfeld Follies. Gray ocean stretched in all directions. Europe and Asia Minor were dead behind them. Ahead lay America and new horizons.

Related Characters: Cal/lie Stephanides (speaker), Desdemona Stephanides, Eleutherios “Lefty” Stephanides
Page Number: 68
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 2: Henry Ford’s English-Language Melting Pot Quotes

My grandparents had every reason to believe that Sourmelina would keep their secret. She’d come to America with a secret of her own, a secret that would be guarded by our family until Sourmelina died in 1979, whereupon, like everyone’s secrets, it was posthumously declassified, so that people began to speak of “Sourmelina’s girlfriends.” A secret kept, in other words, only by the loosest definition, so that now—as I get ready to leak the information myself—I feel only a sight twinge of filial guilt.

Sourmelina’s secret (as Aunt Zo put it): “Lina was one of those women they named the island after.”

Related Characters: Cal/lie Stephanides (speaker), Zoë Antoniou (“Aunt Zo”) (speaker), Desdemona Stephanides, Eleutherios “Lefty” Stephanides, Sourmelina Zizmo
Page Number: 85-86
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 2: Minotaurs Quotes

This once-divided city reminds me of myself My struggle for unification, for Einheit. Coming from a city still cut in half by racial hatred, I feel hopeful here in Berlin.

Related Characters: Cal/lie Stephanides (speaker), Desdemona Stephanides, Eleutherios “Lefty” Stephanides, Sourmelina Zizmo
Page Number: 106
Explanation and Analysis:

Parents are supposed to pass down physical traits to their children, but it’s my belief that all sorts of other things get passed down, too: motifs, scenarios, even fates.

Related Characters: Cal/lie Stephanides (speaker), Desdemona Stephanides, Eleutherios “Lefty” Stephanides, Sourmelina Zizmo, Jimmy Zizmo a.k.a. Minister Fard
Page Number: 109
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 2: Clarinet Serenade Quotes

If Sourmelina had always been a European kind of American, a sort of Marlene Dietrich, then Tessie was the fully Americanized daughter Dietrich might have had. Her mainstream, even countrified, looks extended to the slight gap between her teeth and her turned-up nose. Traits often skip a generation. I look much more typically Greek than my mother does.

Related Characters: Cal/lie Stephanides (speaker), Theodora “Tessie” Stephanides, Sourmelina Zizmo
Page Number: 174
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 3: Home Movies Quotes

The truth was that in those days Desdemona was struggling against assimilationist pressures she couldn’t resist. Though she had lived in America as an eternal exile, a visitor for forty years, certain bits of her adopted country had been seeping under the locked doors of her disapproval.

Related Characters: Cal/lie Stephanides (speaker), Desdemona Stephanides
Page Number: 222
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 3: Opa! Quotes

“The matter with us is you.” How many times did I hear that growing up? Delivered by Milton in his so-called black accent, delivered whenever any liberal pundit talked about the “culturally deprived” or the “underclass” or “empowerment zones,” spoken out of the belief that this one statement, having been delivered to him while the blacks themselves burned down a significant portion of our beloved city, proved its own absurdity. As the years went on, Milton used it as a shield against any opinions to the contrary, and finally it grew into a kind of mantra, the explanation for why the world was going to hell, applicable not only to African Americans but to feminists and homosexuals; and then of course he liked to use it on us, whenever we were late for dinner or wore clothes Tessie didn’t approve of.

Related Characters: Cal/lie Stephanides (speaker), Milton (Militadies) Stephanides (speaker), Theodora “Tessie” Stephanides
Page Number: 246
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 3: Middlesex Quotes

[…] right about this time Lefty’s English began to deteriorate. He made spelling and grammatical mistakes he’d long mastered and soon he began writing broken English and then no English at all. He made written allusions to Bursa, and now Desdemona began to worry. She knew that the backward progression of her husband’s mind could lead to only one place, back to the days when he wasn’t her husband but her brother, and she lay in bed at night awaiting the moment with trepidation.

Related Characters: Cal/lie Stephanides (speaker), Desdemona Stephanides, Eleutherios “Lefty” Stephanides
Page Number: 268
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 3: The Wolverette Quotes

Until we came to Baker & Inglis my friends and I had always felt completely American. But now the Bracelets’ upturned noses suggested that there was another America to which we could never gain admittance. All of a sudden America wasn’t about hamburgers and hot rods anymore. It was about the Mayflower and Plymouth Rock. It was about something that had happened for two minutes four hundred years ago, instead of everything that had happened since. Instead of everything that was happening now!

Related Characters: Cal/lie Stephanides (speaker)
Page Number: 298-299
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 3: Waxing Lyrical Quotes

I suspect that Chapter Eleven’s transformation was caused in no small part by that day on his bed when his life was decided by lottery. Am I projecting? Saddling my brother with my own obsessions with chance and fate? Maybe. But as we planned a trip—a trip that had been promised when Milton was saved from another war—it appeared that Chapter Eleven, taking chemical trips of his own, was trying to escape what he had dimly perceived while wrapped in an afghan: the possibility that not only his draft number was decided by lottery, but that everything was.

Related Characters: Cal/lie Stephanides (speaker), Milton (Militadies) Stephanides, Chapter Eleven Stephanides
Page Number: 317
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 3: Flesh and Blood Quotes

In 1974, instead of reclaiming his roots by visiting Bursa, my father renounced them. Forced to choose between his native land and his ancestral one, he didn’t hesitate.

Related Characters: Cal/lie Stephanides (speaker), Milton (Militadies) Stephanides
Page Number: 363
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 4: The Oracular Vulva Quotes

Some people inherit houses; others paintings or highly insured violin bows. Still others get a Japanese tansu or a famous name. I got a recessive gene on my fifth chromosome and some very rare family jewels indeed.

Related Characters: Cal/lie Stephanides (speaker), The Obscure Object
Related Symbols: The Recessive Gene
Page Number: 401
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 4: Looking Myself Up in Webster’s Quotes

In addition, the subject has been raised in the Greek Orthodox tradition, with its strongly sex-defined roles. In general the parents seem assimilationist and very “all-American” in their outlook, but the presence of this deeper ethnic identity should not be overlooked.

Related Characters: Dr. Luce (speaker), Cal/lie Stephanides, Milton (Militadies) Stephanides, Theodora “Tessie” Stephanides
Page Number: 436
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 4: Go West, Young Man Quotes

I’d like to work in the embassy in Istanbul. I’ve put in a request to be transferred there. It would bring me full circle.

Until that happens, I do my part this way. I watch the bread baker in the döner restaurant downstairs […] Stephanides, an American, grandchild of Greeks, admires this Turkish immigrant to Germany, this Gastarbeiter, as he bakes bread on Hauptstrasse here in the year 2001. We’re all made up of many parts, other halves. Not just me.

Related Characters: Cal/lie Stephanides (speaker)
Page Number: 440
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 4: Gender Dysphoria in San Francisco Quotes

If one of the guys had a girlfriend there would be a girl around for a while. I stayed away from them, feeling they might guess my secret.

I was like an immigrant, putting on airs, who runs into someone from the old country.

Related Characters: Cal/lie Stephanides (speaker), Sourmelina Zizmo
Page Number: 471
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 4: Hermaphroditus Quotes

There have been hermaphrodites around forever, Cal. Forever. Plato said that the original human being was a hermaphrodite. Did you know that? The original person was two halves, one male, one female. Then these got separated. That’s why everybody’s always searching for their other half. Except for us. We’ve got both halves already.

Related Characters: Zora (speaker), Cal/lie Stephanides
Page Number: 489
Explanation and Analysis:
No matches.