Top 100 Jennifer Egan Quotes
#1. Nineteen eighty is almost here, thank God. the hippies are getting old, they blew their brains on acid and now they're begging on street corners all over San Francisco. Their hair is tangled and their bare feet are thick and gray as shoes. We're sick of them.
Jennifer Egan
#2. The blue, mosquitoey night pushes in from the hotel windows.
Jennifer Egan
#3. It seemed impossible that a scrappy book like 'Goon Squad' could win an award like that. It's such an iconic honor. I think what the Pulitzer means to me is that I'll need to work very, very hard to try to live up to it.
Jennifer Egan
#5. I was obsessed with The Who. I would have accepted a marriage proposal from Roger Daltrey on the spot. I went to all of their shows in San Francisco and some in L.A. That was as close as I got to being a groupie.
Jennifer Egan
#6. It is technically impossible for a man to look better in a Speedo than in swim trunks.
Jennifer Egan
#7. Some mornings ... I sit at the kitchen table shaking salt into the hairs on my arm, and a feeling shoves up in me: it's finished. Everything went past without me.
Jennifer Egan
#8. What I Suddenly Understand
My job is to make people uncomfortable. + I will do it all my life.
> My mother, Sasha Blake, is my first victim.
Jennifer Egan
#9. Reading is the nourishment that lets you do interesting work.
Jennifer Egan
#10. He hugs her to him. When Charlie was little he did this all the time, but as she grows older it happens less. Her father is warm, almost hot, his heartbeat like someone banging on a heavy door.
Jennifer Egan
#11. The pause makes you think the song will end. And then the song isn't really over, so you're relieved. But then the song does actually end, because every song ends, obviously, and THAT. TIME. THE. END. IS. FOR. REAL.
Jennifer Egan
#12. That adage about 'Write what you know' is basically the opposite of the way I function. I write about what I'm curious to find out.
Jennifer Egan
#13. The seconds pass. I know what's going on because it's the same thing that always happens: give me something nice, something I love or want or need, and I'll find a way to grind it into dust.
Jennifer Egan
#14. I am at my worst trying to write about things that overlap with my life.
Jennifer Egan
#15. I think ethical ambivalence is a kind of innoculation, a way of excusing yourself in advance for something you actually want to do. No offense.
Jennifer Egan
#16. What he needed was to find fifty more people like him, who had stopped being themselves without realizing it.
Jennifer Egan
#17. See," Sasha muttered, eyeing the sun. "It's mine.
Jennifer Egan
#19. Then tell them, faintly, 'I heard screaming'. Men with a history of violence live in fear of retribution.
Jennifer Egan
#20. The sky was electric blue above the trees but the yard felt dark. Stephanie went to the edge of the lawn and sat her forehead on her knees. The grass and soil were still warm from the day. She wanted to cry but she couldn't. The feeling was too deep.
Jennifer Egan
#21. That we have some history together that hasn't happened yet.
Jennifer Egan
#22. The answers were maddeningly absent - it was like trying to remember a song that you knew made you feel a certain way, without a title, artist, or even a few bars to bring it back.
Jennifer Egan
#23. Even the most secure houses achieve, in deep night, a state of relative unconsciousness.
Jennifer Egan
#24. I know I'm famous and irresitible - a combination whose properties closely resemble radioactivity - and I know that you in this room are helpless against me.
Jennifer Egan
#25. You can only write regularly if you're willing to write badly. You can't write regularly and well. One should accept bad writing as a way of priming the pump, a warm-up exercise that allows you to write well.
Jennifer Egan
#26. They must have looked like traveling companions, Phoebe thought, possibly even a couple. She noticed her voice leaning into laughter, how she tossed her head, each tiny gesture like the sweet ache of a muscle craving exercise.
Jennifer Egan
#27. Bernadette longs for this moment as if it had already passed, as if it could have been. Yet here it is.
Jennifer Egan
#28. I'm always happy," Sasha said. "Sometimes I just forget.
Jennifer Egan
#29. He gestured at the girl I'd been dealing with, whose carefree smile could be roughly translated as: 'He's officially not my problem anymore.' I gave her a wink whose exact translation was: 'Don't be so sure, darling.
Jennifer Egan
#30. One area I have a huge amount of trouble in is writing about myself. I get a heavy, almost depressed feeling.
Jennifer Egan
#31. Kind of like saying 'no offense' when you've just said something offensive?
Jennifer Egan
#32. And it was only as he rose from the bed, his body illuminated by the colored lights of the city, that I caught the glint of calculation behind his eyes, a cold, blank set to his face. His shadow self, and not a nice one.
Jennifer Egan
#33. Too clear, too clean. The problem was precision, perfection;
Jennifer Egan
#34. She gave up the rest. The relief was physical, like releasing a long tight breath that had crowded her lungs for too long, letting it go because it was stale, the oxygen was gone.
Jennifer Egan
#35. And it's all kind of moving and sweet except that you're not completely there - a part of you is a few feet away, or above, thinking,
Jennifer Egan
#36. I was a stepchild in two different families. The hardest thing about being a stepchild is you know that in some way everything would be easier if you didn't exist.
Jennifer Egan
#37. The river runs wide and passive in sunlit stretches, then fast and bawdy with whitewater rapids.
Jennifer Egan
#38. Because you can't write habitually and well all the time, you have to be willing to write badly. That's how you get the regularity that enables you to be present for the good stuff.
Jennifer Egan
#39. I think, for one thing, all of us remember those teenage years and those songs that we fell in love with and the music scene that we were part of. So, in a certain way, music cuts through time like almost nothing else. You know, it makes us feel like we're back in an earlier moment.
Jennifer Egan
#40. I'm sorry and I believe in you and I'll always be near you, protecting you, and I will never leave you, I'll be curled around your heart for the rest of your life.
Jennifer Egan
#41. I've never been that confident. I don't tend to think, swaggeringly, 'I'm going to ace this.' It's just not who I am.
Jennifer Egan
#42. Knowing all of this makes us one step closer to being real, but not completely. When does a fake Mohawk become a real Mohawk? Who decides? How do you know it's happened?
Jennifer Egan
#43. Jules turned to her, incredulous. 'Do you socialize with Republicans?'
'It happens, Jules.
Jennifer Egan
#44. You said you were a fairy princess
You said you were a shooting star
You said we'd go to Bora Bora
Now look at where the fuck we are
Jennifer Egan
#45. When does a fake Mohawk become a real Mohawk? Who decides? How do you know if it's happened?
Jennifer Egan
#46. She wanted the city to be full of exclusive places turning people away, as long as they always accommodated her. It didn't work like that. What a stupid place to live - stretched thin, overbooked, sold out in advance.
Jennifer Egan
#47. A weird sequence of weather events had left a thin skin of ice around every tree and branch and twig. Each time the wind blew, a splintery groan issued from all directions at once.
Jennifer Egan
#48. But Phoebe loved her mother best as she was now, wistful, out-of-step, her laugh tinged always with sadness, as if things were only funny in spite of themselves.
Jennifer Egan
#49. ...water laughing softly down a black stone wall.
Jennifer Egan
#50. If I had a view like this to look down on every day, I would have the energy and inspiration to conquer the world. The trouble is, when you most need such a view, no one gives it to you.
Jennifer Egan
#51. This vision tumbled over Phoebe with the force of revelation: she would stand somewhere and look back, she would live a life.
Jennifer Egan
#52. I'm a dogged person. I respond to adversity with a steely resistance.
Jennifer Egan
#53. The monkey's face had more emotions than a human's: curiosity, pity, exhaustion, like he'd already seen too much. Danny had to look away.
Jennifer Egan
#54. My last novel, 'The Keep,' was very explicitly technological, about the quality of living in a state constantly surrounded by disembodied presences, and I was thinking very much about the online experience.
Jennifer Egan
#55. It was the hat. He looked sweet in the hat. How could a man in a fuzzy blue hat have used human bones to pave his roads?
Jennifer Egan
#56. I was on a very bumpy plane ride, an overnight flight. I was so miserable, and I pulled out 'David Copperfield,' and I forgot how scared and tired I was, and I thought, 'This is what reading should be.' I'm utterly transported out of my current situation.
Jennifer Egan
#57. We lie. That's what we do. You're selling me a line of bullshit and you want me to sell you a line of bullshit back so you can write a major line of bullshit and be paid for it.
Jennifer Egan
#58. I understood that expensive shirts looked better than cheap shirts. The fabric wasn't shiny, no - shiny would be cheap. But it glowed, like there was light coming through from the inside. It was a fucking beautiful shirt, is what I'm saying
Jennifer Egan
#59. Structural dissatisfaction: Returning to circumstances that once pleased you, after having experienced a more thrilling or opulent way of life, and finding that you can no longer tolerate them.
Jennifer Egan
#60. People define themselves to some degree by the music that they listened to as teens. My mom had Elvis. Me, I had 'The Who' and later punk rock. Kids who came up in the '80s had other songs and bands. It's a way of placing ourselves culturally and temporally.
Jennifer Egan
#61. A swell of gratitude and appreciation for his assistant, as opposed to the murderous rage he felt toward the rest of his staff
Jennifer Egan
#62. Hindsight creates the illusion that your life has led you inevitably to the present moment.
Jennifer Egan
#63. Even the financial disclosure statements that political bloggers were required to post hadn't stemmed the suspicion that people's opinions weren't really their own. "Who's paying you?" was a retort that might follow any bout of enthusiasm, along with laughter - who would let themselves be bought?
Jennifer Egan
#64. The most beautiful warrior, who has scar tissue designs coiled like railroad tracks over the rigorous architecture of his chest and shoulders and back.
Jennifer Egan
#65. Underneath that I'd said something else: we were both a couple of asswipes, and now only I'm an asswipe; why? And underneath that, something else: once an asswipe, always an asswipe.
Jennifer Egan
#66. The sky above the buildings outside their apartment windows is the color of a dusty chalkboard, and the light coming down onto the street is exactly the color of boredom.
Jennifer Egan
#67. Be willing and unafraid to write badly, because often the bad stuff ... forms a base on which to build something better.
Jennifer Egan
#68. The way that Dickens structured his books has a form that we most readily recognize now from, say, the great T.V. series, like 'The Wire' or 'The Sopranos.' There's one central plot line, but then from that spin off all kinds of subplots.
Jennifer Egan
#69. I wonder what Proust would have made of our present-day locus of collective fantasy, the Internet. I'm guessing he would have seized on its wistful aspect, pointing out gently and with wry humor that much of what beguiles us is the act of reaching for what isn't there.
Jennifer Egan
#70. Now that Scotty has entered the realm of myth, everyone wants to own him. And maybe they should. Doesn't a myth belong to everyone?
Jennifer Egan
#71. That's how New York looked: like a gorgeous, easy thing to have, even for me.
Jennifer Egan
#72. The music industry is an interesting lens through which to look at change, because it has had such a difficult time adjusting to the digital age.
Jennifer Egan
#73. Read at the level at which you want to write. Reading is the nourishment that feeds the kind of writing you want to do.
Jennifer Egan
#74. I sensed immediately that he'd once been overweight. He moved with a fat person's tiptoey apology.
Jennifer Egan
#75. Being somewhere but not completely: that was home for Danny ... All he needed was a cellphone or I-access, or both at once, or even just a plan to leave wherever he was and go someplace else really really soon.
Jennifer Egan
#76. I don't know what happened to me," he said, shaking his head. "I honestly don't." ...
"You grew up, Alex.
Jennifer Egan
#77. Her only thought was of getting away, as if she were carrying a live grenade from inside the house, so that when it exploded, it would destroy just herself.
Jennifer Egan
#78. In a way, I'm always trying to do something I'm not qualified to do. So I feel that lack of qualification. And I'm scared. And I have a tendency to think things may not/probably won't work out. That's my basic mindset.
Jennifer Egan
#79. All her excitement had seeped away, leaving behind a terrible sadness, an emptiness that felt violent, as if she'd been gouged.
Jennifer Egan
#80. The sound of the wind against the sides of the house is exactly like the sound of wolf fur against cardboard.
Jennifer Egan
#81. Skin-that smooth plump sweetly fragrant sac upon which life scrawls the record of our failures and exhaustion
Jennifer Egan
#82. Her face was fragile and mischievous, pale enough to absorb hues from the world around her-purple, green, pink-like a face painted by Lucian Freud.
Jennifer Egan
#83. years. In fact the whole apartment, which six years ago had seemed like a way station to some better place, had ended up solidifying around Sasha, gathering mass and weight, until she felt both mired in it and lucky to have it - as if she not only couldn't move on but didn't want to.
Jennifer Egan
#84. Everybody sounds stoned, because they're e-mailing people the whole time they're talking to you.
Jennifer Egan
#85. But a story was invisible, infinite, it had no size or shape. Information. It could fill the world or fit inside a fingernail.
Jennifer Egan
#86. And see those metaphors 'up front' and 'out in the open' are part of a system we call atavistic purism. AP implies the existence of an ethically perfect state which not only doesn't exist and never existed but it's usually used to shore up the prejudices of whoever's making the judgments.
Jennifer Egan
#87. But it was another girl, young and new to the city, fiddling with her keys.
Jennifer Egan
#88. He looks tired, like someone walked on his skin and left footprints.
Jennifer Egan
#89. There are things you're just positive will happen to you. Then there's that second when you realize, Jesus Christ. Maybe they won't.
Jennifer Egan
#90. Market Street, a steamy puddle at every curb. We find our way down alleys, our crazy eyes making diamonds of the shattered glass that covers the streets and sidewalks. Nothing touches us. We float under the orange streetlamps.
Jennifer Egan
#91. Rich children are always blond, Jocelyn goes. It has to do with vitamins.
Jennifer Egan
#92. Americans are less selfish than some of our politicians believe and will respond with reason and resilience to passionate clarity.
Jennifer Egan
#93. Sure, everything is ending," Jules said, "but not yet.
Jennifer Egan
#94. Das mine!' protested Ava, Bennie's daughter, affirming Alex's recent theory that language acquisition involved a phase of speaking German. She snatched a plastic skillet away from his own daughter, Cara-Ann, who lurched after it, roaring, 'Mine pot! Mine pot!
Jennifer Egan
#95. And the feeling I had was not of wanting her so much as being surrounded by her, blundering inside her life without having moved.
Jennifer Egan
#96. The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh.
Jennifer Egan
#97. Thousands of solar panels lift and tilt at the same time, in the same way. I clutch at Dad's arm: "Why are they doing that?" "They're collecting moonlight," Dad says, and I remember: it's weaker, but we use it.
Jennifer Egan
#98. There are so many things that can take a person somewhere else, but none of those things ever happened to me,
Jennifer Egan
#99. Bennie has light brown skin and excellent eyes, and he irons his hair in a Mohawk as shiny black as a virgin record.
Jennifer Egan
#100. I can't tell if she's actually real, or if she's stopped caring if she's real or not. Or is not caring what makes a person real?
Jennifer Egan
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