How we cite our quotes: (Book.Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
In that optimistic, postwar America [...] everybody was the master of his own destiny. (1.1.35)
This isn't like being master of your own domain. Do you think Cal is being ironic here? How many people do you know whose lives have turned out exactly as they planned? Did your parents' lives turn out exactly as they thought they would?
Quote #2
She appeared at church that one day and never again, and seems to have existed for the sole purpose of changing my mother's mind. (1.1.73)
Cal is describing a girl his brother spilled hot coffee on. She could have changed their mother's mind in many ways: made her not want to have another boy, kept her from realizing how into her Father Mike still was, sent her to Dunkin Donuts on an emergency java dash… Who knows? Whatever happened, this was a small action that made huge ripples in the fates of many.
Quote #3
[Desdemona] didn't envision her insides as a vast computer code, all 1s and 0s, an infinity of sequences, any one of which might contain a bug. (1.2.84)
Even if Desdemona was thinking about DNA, she wouldn't even know what a computer was. Anachronism aside, this shows how much our DNA controls our lives. Are we pre-programmed for certain successes and failures because of our genes?
Quote #4
"They couldn't read. They were illiterate! [...] They couldn't read my letter." (1.3.184)
So many things set this book's events into motion. Dr. Philobosian has a letter of immunity, but the soldiers who come his house can't read it, so they kill his kids. With his family dead, he flees to America. There, he botches Cal's birth, and so on and so forth. How would things have been different if the Turkish soldiers has cracked a book every now and then?
Quote #5
Great discoveries, whether of silk or gravity, are always windfalls. They happen to people loafing under trees. (1.4.1)
This is a nicer way of saying that good things happen when you least expect them. Love. Happiness. Success. Winning Publisher's Clearing House…
Quote #6
[Desdemona] kept waiting for something to happen, some disease, some abnormality, fearing that the punishment for her crime was going to be taken out in the most devastating way possible: not on her own soul but in the bodies of her children. (2.4.60)
Wow—we're glad we don't have her as a grandmother. We're not too keen on paying for the sins of ancestors, but maybe that's something we all do anyway…
Quote #7
Every Greek drama needs a deus ex machina. (2.6.88)
Deus ex machina means "god in the machine," and it is pretty much a big ol' red flag that fate is on the way. Can you explain Milton's last-minute reprieve from death any other way?
Quote #8
An aneurysm had burst in Maxine Grossinger's brain. (3.6.164)
Yikes. Is it possible that Maxine Grossinger's sole purpose in life was to die on stage to bring Cal and the Object close together? That seems to be what Eugenides thinks by only showing us this brief, tragic moment in this unfortunately named girl's brief, tragic life.
Quote #9
In the end it wasn't up to me. The big things never are. Birth, I mean, and death. And love. And what love bequeaths to us before we're born. (3.10.64)
This is about as definitive of a quote as you can get about fate. Cal believes that certain things are beyond his control. We agree that you can't control birth or death (despite what Cher wants you to think as she gets older), but what about love?
Quote #10
Free will is making a comeback. Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind. (4.5.5)
What do you think Cal means here? Did people not have free will once upon a time, but now they do? Maybe we were meant to say this… maybe you shouldn't even think about it… the answer has been predetermined. We knew you'd be here reading this. And thinking about goats. (You're thinking about goats now, aren't you?)
Quote #11
Fate or luck had brought me here and I had to take from it what I needed. (4.5.66)
Okay, two things here: (1) A question: What's the difference between fate and luck? (2) A thought: This is a good combination of fate and free will, isn't it? Cal believes that fate (or luck) got him into the, ahem, sticky situation he's in, but he's going to use willpower to get out of it.