Top 100 Egan Quotes
#1. The Universe may be stranger than we can imagine, but it's going to have a tough time outdoing Egan.
Greg Egan
#2. A screenplay adaptation of my 'Punktown' novel 'Health Agent' has been making the rounds. The screenplay was written by my friend, singer/songwriter Walter Egan of 'Magnet & Steel' fame!
Jeffrey Thomas
#3. I want people to read good work. If I see someone reading a book by Lorrie Moore or Jennifer Egan, I'm psyched. If I see them reading X Latin American Writer Who Sucks, I'm not psyched. But in terms of news, I do think that's important.
Daniel Alarcon
#4. I do wish I could write like some of the American women, who can be clever and heartfelt and hopeful; people like Lorrie Moore and Jennifer Egan. But Ireland messed me up too much, I think, so I can't.
Anne Enright
#5. But the fact is," I continued, "that despite their sadness, and despite my guilt, and despite Egan's anger, I went ahead and did what I needed to do for myself. In the end, it's selfish.
Kate Mulgrew
#6. I have the whole team just around the block! One call and they'll ride in here like cavalry! Riding on... robots! Giant robots! Well, not giant robots, like in Egan, but... but... big enough robots!
Dennis Liggio
#7. 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
#8. The blue, mosquitoey night pushes in from the hotel windows.
Jennifer Egan
#9. 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
#11. We paused to nod in deference to a just-arrived mom of six who placed third in her age group in the Ironman and has a successful catering business, No Small Affair. Everyone suspects she's on meth but still, the woman commands respect.
Elisabeth Egan
#12. I love to put on a wig, a costume, inhabit a different world and be called something different.
Susan Egan
#13. Pop science goes flying off in all kinds of fashionable directions, and it often drags a lot of SF writers with it. I've been led astray like that myself at times.
Greg Egan
#14. Technology makes everyone feel old. A laptop is old after two years. Someone always has something newer. Everyone seems to feel obsolete now, even the young.
Jennifer Egan
#15. 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
#16. the Forest Service has punched 343,000 miles of logging roads into the vast stands of public trees - more than seven times the 44,000 miles of road built by the national highway system.
Timothy Egan
#17. Isn't that what the Peerless is for? Anything too difficult for the home world?
Greg Egan
#18. You can't tell. That's something I'm learning here in N.Y.C: you have no fucking idea what people are really like. They're not even two-faced
they're, like, multiple personalities.
Jennifer Egan
#19. The art of injudicious reading, the art of miscellaneous reading which every normal man ought to cultivate, is a very fine and satisfactory art; for the best guide to books is a book itself. It clasps hands with a thousand other books.
Maurice Francis Egan
#20. In Naples, there were kids who were just lost. You knew they were never going to get back to what they'd been, or have a normal life. And then there were other ones who you though, maybe they will. What I'm saying is, we're the survivors. Not everyone is. But we are. Okay?
Jennifer Egan
#21. Let me understand you. Let me piece you together, hold you together. Let me help you to explain yourself.
Greg Egan
#22. We have a special name, here, for a certain kind of failure to defer to the greater good - for putting a personal sense of doing right above any objective measure of the outcome. It's called 'moral vanity'.
Greg Egan
#23. ...our familiar features rinsed in weird adulthood.
Jennifer Egan
#24. When you're a kid, you think you're going to have this deep well of time with your parents when you grow up and you're all on equal footing.
Elisabeth Egan
#25. Don't get me wrong - I enjoy my real life, but I feel about it much the way I do about New York City, my chosen and adored home: I'm always happy to leave, and I'm always happy to come back.
Jennifer Egan
#26. It is technically impossible for a man to look better in a Speedo than in swim trunks.
Jennifer Egan
#27. 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
#28. At the wedding, women served a dish of cabbage that had been shredded by wooden kraut cutters, mixed with ground pork and onion, wrapped in bread dough, and baked.
Timothy Egan
#29. A recent survey of 2,000 male graduates of Harvard Business School
found that penis length & IQ were equally good predictors of annual
income.
from Eugene
Greg Egan
#30. 'Look at Me' started with Rockford, Illinois and New York and the question of how much image culture was changing our inner lives. That's an abstract idea; you don't think that's going to be a rocking work of fiction, but it seemed to fuse in a way that was interesting.
Jennifer Egan
#31. It made me alert, like someone had scrubbed mint all over my skin. I'd walk into that stinking, miserable prison and for the next three hours, a wise and beautiful woman would float out of the wreckage of my life, and her words and thoughts and tiniest movements were precious.
Jennifer Egan
#32. 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
#33. The goal isn't to be successful; it's to be happy. And so it doesn't matter if I'm doing things in New York or teaching high school or I drop it altogether and sell coffee. The goal is to be happy, and people and relationships are what makes you happy.
Susan Egan
#34. Evolution was a random walk across a minefield, not a pre-ordained trajectory, onward and upward toward perfection.
Greg Egan
#35. Lying perfectly still, they would gaze at each other in thick exhaustion and nothing would seem to divide them: they could float inside each other freely as fish drifting through windows of underwater castles.
Jennifer Egan
#36. and the question is, which one is really "you,
Jennifer Egan
#37. Reading is the nourishment that lets you do interesting work.
Jennifer Egan
#38. 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
#39. Understanding an idea meant entangling it so thoroughly with all the other symbols in your mind that it changed the way you thought about everything. Still,
Greg Egan
#40. When I was little, I wanted to be a doctor. I was really interested in gore. My grandfather was an orthopedic surgeon and he had a lot of books in his library that I would just pore over. A lot of them had really horrible pictures of deformities.
Jennifer Egan
#42. For there is a truth which cannot be bought or sold, imposed by force, resisted or escaped.
Greg Egan
#43. Ted shrank from these youths, though he was six foot four and weighed in at two hundred thirty, with a face that looked innocuous enough in the bathroom mirror but often prompted colleagues to ask him what was the matter.
Jennifer Egan
#44. 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
#45. Beyond these shores, whenever two or more Irishmen are gathered together, everything almost can be done.
Tim Egan
#46. Seattle gets less rain than New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington and Miami.
Timothy Egan
#47. 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
#48. Mindy felt a jolt of attraction roughly akin to having someone seize her intestines and twist.
Jennifer Egan
#49. We're the survivors. Not everyone is. But we are.
Jennifer Egan
#50. See how everything now is precious, how someday I'll know I was lucky to be here.
Jennifer Egan
#51. 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
#52. Order my life. I'm nothing without you: fragments of time, fragments of words, fragments of feelings. Make sense of me. Make me whole.
Greg Egan
#53. So cotton growers, siphoning from the Ogallala, get three billion dollars a year in taxpayer money for fiber that is shipped to China, where it is used to make cheap clothing sold back to American chain retail stores like Wal-Mart.
Timothy Egan
#54. Treat everybody the same way you want to be treated
Kian Egan
#55. I don't trust people with empty-stomach breath to tell me what taste is.
Tracie Egan
#56. I am at my worst trying to write about things that overlap with my life.
Jennifer Egan
#57. Redemption, transformation
God how she wanted these things. Every day, every minute. Didn't everyone?
Jennifer Egan
#58. Occasionally, don't be afraid to say: This is what we deserve.
Ted Egan
#59. They were snobs or idiots or both ... yet she was inexplicably crushed by their coldness.
Jennifer Egan
#60. Howie's troubles were a favorite family topic, and behind the shaking heads and oh it's so sads you could hear the joy pushing right up through because doesn't every family like having one person who's fucked up so fantastically that everyone else feels like a model citizen next to him?
Jennifer Egan
#61. I don't have any structured grand plan; I just intend to keep writing about the things that interest me-some of which change, some of which don't.
Greg Egan
#62. The villainous sun and the starved bank did not seem related - yet.
Timothy Egan
#63. Th blu nyt
th stRs u can't c
th hum tht nevr gOs awy
Jennifer Egan
#64. In the fall of 1887, Ed Curtis and his father arrived in the Puget Sound area, which was opening up to land opportunists after treaties had removed most of the Indian, and all of the British, claims to the region.
Timothy Egan
#65. The album's called A to B, right?" Bosco said. "And that's the question I want to hit straight on: how did I go from being a rock star to being a fat fuck no one cares about? Let's not pretend it didn't happen.
Jennifer Egan
#66. 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
#67. You can admire people for sure, and they're worth admiring, but you need to find that special thing about yourself. It takes working hard, getting the technique, and learning to sing and all that stuff, but the master class is about bringing yourself to the role.
Susan Egan
#68. What he needed was to find fifty more people like him, who had stopped being themselves without realizing it.
Jennifer Egan
#69. If you're not getting any bad reviews, you're not taking enough risks
Susan Egan
#70. You know my position. We need to come back in force and deal with this sickness once and for all: occupy the city, impose our own laws, harvest every noxious plant and burn it. It
Greg Egan
#71. Fandom is about fandom, it's a great big social club.
Greg Egan
#72. Sense of humor. A girl who doesn't take themselves too seriously. And someone who is spontaneous. They're the three things for me that really attract me to a girl.
Christopher Egan
#73. In Pinchot, he saw someone "who could relish, not run from a rainstorm," as he wrote. Just like himself.
Timothy Egan
#74. How does it feel to be seven thousand years old?"
"That depends."
"On what?"
"On how I want to feel.
Greg Egan
#75. I hope you theorists know what you're doing.' 'I can assure you that we don't. The geometry is still beyond us. All I learnt in the void was that our best guess so far is certainly wrong.
Greg Egan
#76. See," Sasha muttered, eyeing the sun. "It's mine.
Jennifer Egan
#77. Kathy was a Republican, one of those people who used the unforgivable phrase "meant to be"
usually when describing her own good fortune or the disasters that had befallen other people.
Jennifer Egan
#79. Then tell them, faintly, 'I heard screaming'. Men with a history of violence live in fear of retribution.
Jennifer Egan
#80. Noreen didn't speak, and as the minutes passed she seemed to fade into the rummaging breeze and chatter of insects, as if the night itself were alive.
Jennifer Egan
#81. How do you know which parts of the world are you, in the polises?' 'Are there citizens in Konishi who eat music?' 'Is not having a body like falling all the time, without moving?
Greg Egan
#82. 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
#83. Last year, [Pope Francis] was asked about his secret to happiness. He said slow down. Take time off. Live and let live. Don't proselytize. Work for peace. Work at a job that offers basic human dignity. Don't hold on to negative feelings. Move calmly through life. Enjoy art, books and playfulness.
Timothy Egan
#84. I love your hair. It's like a waterfall of black ink," he utters softly.
Petra F. Bagnardi
#85. That we have some history together that hasn't happened yet.
Jennifer Egan
#86. You talk to God, you're religious. God talks to you, you're psychotic.
Doris Egan
#87. 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
#88. Even the most secure houses achieve, in deep night, a state of relative unconsciousness.
Jennifer Egan
#89. I loved every minute of my childhood - sunbathing on the fire escape, digging for buried treasure in the back yard, pulling alewives out of the sand ... Then it was all taken away from me. I came back every summer to visit my father until I was 18, but I was always the outsider.
Jennifer Egan
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. If you don't have people that the reader cares about and stories that are gripping, you've got nothing.
Jennifer Egan
#93. Who exactly am I saving from shame, when I'll live and die in every possible way?
Greg Egan
#94. 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
#95. Bernadette longs for this moment as if it had already passed, as if it could have been. Yet here it is.
Jennifer Egan
#96. Of all the countries in the world, we Americans have been the greatest destroyers of land of any race of people barbaric or civilized," Bennett said in a speech at the start of the dust storms. What was happening, he said, was "sinister", a symptom of "our stupendous ignorance.
Timothy Egan
#97. I'm always happy," Sasha said. "Sometimes I just forget.
Jennifer Egan
#98. It was like listening to two badly written computer programs trying to convince each other that they were sentient.
Greg Egan
#99. The world is full of shitheads, Rhea. Don't listen to them - listen to me. And I know that Lou is one of those shitheads. But I listen.
Jennifer Egan
#100. 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
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
