"Middlesex" Quotes

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

Genes in the same person have been turning up dressed for vastly different occasions.

Emotion, in my experience, isn't evenly distributed or constant. Being cracked open like a walnut every few hours creates an irregular emotional landscape.

It strikes me that the genetic code doesn't have a 'stop' button.

But none of his shifts described the dividing lines of my life: past and future, family and strangers, body and soul, land and sea.

Sexual identity, it is argued, is part of the structure of history, like the formation of nations and the colonies themselves.

Both the isolation and the rebound shaped my character in ways that remained permanent.

My desire to procreate was all ancient illicitness.

Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever.

I was like one of those hapless male mice who barely survive scientific experiments in motivational-emotional discrepancy.