Jeffrey Eugenides

We could never understand why the girls cared so much about being mature, or why they felt compelled to compliment each other, but sometimes, after one of us had read a long portion of the diary out loud, we had to fight back the urge to hug one another or to tell each other how pretty we were.

You would have killed yourself just to have something to do.

She was the still point of the turning world

It was from Ms. Angelica Turnette, a hospital clerical worker, that we later received the documents that we hold among our most prized possessions (her non union pay hardly made ends meet). T

a photograph was taken of her rosy cervix, which looks like a camera shutter set on an extremely low exposure. (It stares at us now like an inflamed eye, fixing us with its silent accusation.)

we later received the documents that we hold among our most prized possessions (her non union pay hardly made ends meet).

“Obviously, Doctor,” she said, “you’ve never been a thirteen-year-old girl.”

Her act was a cry for help.

When she jumped, she probably thought she’d fly.”

We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn’t fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.