"The Marriage Plot"

Jeffrey Eugenides certainly got college right.

• All over College Hill, in the geometric gardens of the Georgian mansions, the magnolia-scented front yards of Victorians, along brick sidewalks running past black iron fences like those in a Charles Addams cartoon or a Lovecraft story.
• snaked around Puritan graveyards full of headstones as narrow as heaven’s door
• College wasn’t like the real world. In the real world people dropped names based on their renown. In college, people dropped names based on their obscurity.
• Going to college in the moneymaking eighties lacked a certain radicalism. Semiotics was the first thing that smacked of revolution. It drew a line; it created an elect.
• .. introduce myself, actually, because the whole idea of social introductions is so problematized.
• He didn’t run the class so much as observe it from behind the one-way mirror of his opaque personality.
• He aspired to be a person who would react to his own mother’s suicide with high-literary remorselessness, and his soft, young face lit up with pleasure.
• Killing the father was what, in Billy’s opinion, college was all about.
• a discredited discourse—like, say, reason—
• It wasn’t only that these opening sentences of Barthes’ made immediate sense. It wasn’t only the relief at recognizing that here, finally, was a book she might write her final paper on.
• Students had knelt before these boxes just as she was now doing to pull out letters that transformed them instantly into Rhodes Scholars, senatorial aides, fledgling reporters, Wharton matriculants.
• School was a perpetual lineup.