Words For Emotions or A Collections Of Quotes From "Middlesex" By Jeffrey Eugenides

I gleaned quite a collection of quotes from Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. The first is about the lack of words for emotions, surely everyone has felt this at one time or another...

Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. [...] I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." I'd like to show how "intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age." I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar."

Whereas, the quote: "Mr. da Silva had a relevant quotation for everything that happened to him and in this way evaded real life." seems to point much more personally to me.

This next quote comes from an eighth grade girls locker room. Listen to the poetry:

Moving through the humid air, I felt like a snorkeler. On I came [...] gaping [...] at the fantastic underwater life all around me. Sea anemones sprouted from between my classmates' legs. The came in all colors, black, brown, electric yellow, vivid red. Higher up, their breasts bobbed like jellyfish, softly pulsing, tipped with stinging pink. [...] My classmates were as unastonished by their extravagant traits as a blowfish is by its quills.

I have long said that, if I get reincarnated as an animal, I would want to be a sea anemone; and this description doesn't do anything to change my mind.

And finally, a quote that reflects my own emotional realizations of late.

I understood at those times what I was leaving behind: the solidarity of a shared biology. Women know what it means to have a body. They understand its difficulties and failities, its glories and pleasures. Men think their bodies are theirs alone. They tend them in private, even in public.

Can't you see why I so enjoy Eugenides' writing. If you haven't yet read Middlesex do so now.