Top 100 Jennifer Egan Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. The blue, mosquitoey night pushes in from the hotel windows.
Jennifer Egan
#5. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. ...our familiar features rinsed in weird adulthood.
Jennifer Egan
#12. 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
#13. It is technically impossible for a man to look better in a Speedo than in swim trunks.
Jennifer Egan
#14. 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
#15. '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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. and the question is, which one is really "you,
Jennifer Egan
#20. Reading is the nourishment that lets you do interesting work.
Jennifer Egan
#21. 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
#22. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. Mindy felt a jolt of attraction roughly akin to having someone seize her intestines and twist.
Jennifer Egan
#28. We're the survivors. Not everyone is. But we are.
Jennifer Egan
#29. See how everything now is precious, how someday I'll know I was lucky to be here.
Jennifer Egan
#30. 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
#31. I am at my worst trying to write about things that overlap with my life.
Jennifer Egan
#32. Redemption, transformation
God how she wanted these things. Every day, every minute. Didn't everyone?
Jennifer Egan
#33. They were snobs or idiots or both ... yet she was inexplicably crushed by their coldness.
Jennifer Egan
#34. 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
#35. Th blu nyt
th stRs u can't c
th hum tht nevr gOs awy
Jennifer Egan
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. What he needed was to find fifty more people like him, who had stopped being themselves without realizing it.
Jennifer Egan
#39. See," Sasha muttered, eyeing the sun. "It's mine.
Jennifer Egan
#40. 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
#42. Then tell them, faintly, 'I heard screaming'. Men with a history of violence live in fear of retribution.
Jennifer Egan
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. That we have some history together that hasn't happened yet.
Jennifer Egan
#46. 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
#47. Even the most secure houses achieve, in deep night, a state of relative unconsciousness.
Jennifer Egan
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. If you don't have people that the reader cares about and stories that are gripping, you've got nothing.
Jennifer Egan
#52. 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
#53. Bernadette longs for this moment as if it had already passed, as if it could have been. Yet here it is.
Jennifer Egan
#54. I'm always happy," Sasha said. "Sometimes I just forget.
Jennifer Egan
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. One area I have a huge amount of trouble in is writing about myself. I get a heavy, almost depressed feeling.
Jennifer Egan
#58. I'm like America " he said.
Stephanie swung around to look at him unnerved. "What are you talking about " she said. "Are you off your meds "
"Our hands are dirty " Jules said.
Jennifer Egan
#59. A frenzy of activity that had mostly led him in circles: wasn't that a fairly accurate description of lust?
Jennifer Egan
#60. Kind of like saying 'no offense' when you've just said something offensive?
Jennifer Egan
#61. We live in a moment and a culture when reading is really endangered. There's simply no way to write well, though, if you're not reading well.
Jennifer Egan
#63. 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
#64. Too clear, too clean. The problem was precision, perfection;
Jennifer Egan
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. I listened to classic rock and roll, and punk rock. 'Goon Squad' provides a pretty accurate playlist of my teenage years, though it leaves out 'The Who,' which was my absolute favorite band.
Jennifer Egan
#68. I felt more doubtful than usual with 'Goon Squad,' because I knew that the book's genre wasn't easily named - Novel? Stories? Novel-in-stories? - and I worried that its lack of a clear category would count against it. My hopes for it were pretty modest.
Jennifer Egan
#69. After my parents died, it took me months before I could carry on a conversation with someone who had not known them, who expected me to be young and sparkling and untouched by grief.
Jennifer Egan
#70. 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
#71. The river runs wide and passive in sunlit stretches, then fast and bawdy with whitewater rapids.
Jennifer Egan
#72. 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
#73. I hope to keep writing journalism as long as I write fiction; it's afforded me such amazing adventures and opportunities. It does take a lot of time, so it's hard to do both at once, but I try to do a big journalism piece every couple of years, and I'll hopefully continue with that.
Jennifer Egan
#74. She'd risked everything, and here was the result: the raw, warped core of her life.
Jennifer Egan
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. She looks like someone I want to know, or maybe even be.
Jennifer Egan
#78. 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
#79. A sense of that kind of narrative movement that we experience online could have been in my mind easily, though not consciously. I do rely so much on my unconscious, the way I write my stuff the way I do. I let my unconscious work. I have better ideas that way and more interesting work.
Jennifer Egan
#80. 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
#81. I think the one thing that's changed over time is that I've come to realise, as a fiction writer, the fact that I don't think it will work out, doesn't mean that it actually won't.
Jennifer Egan
#82. Jules turned to her, incredulous. 'Do you socialize with Republicans?'
'It happens, Jules.
Jennifer Egan
#83. In the case of 'Goon Squad,' which sold slowly for a long time despite the good reviews, those 'best of 2010' lists were pivotal, and made the book really sell.
Jennifer Egan
#84. 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
#85. It began the usual way, in the bathroom of the Lassimo Hotel.
Jennifer Egan
#88. Time's a goon right? Isn't that the expression?
Jennifer Egan
#89. I think, The world is actually huge. That's the part no one can really explain.
Jennifer Egan
#90. When does a fake Mohawk become a real Mohawk? Who decides? How do you know if it's happened?
Jennifer Egan
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. So this is it what cost me all that time. A man who turned out to be old, a house that turned out to be empty.
Jennifer Egan
#95. ...water laughing softly down a black stone wall.
Jennifer Egan
#96. At the end of an evening, her women friends would hug her, or a friend's husband might slip his arm around her waist to kiss her, just a little too suggestively, and the coldness in her would respond, I don't give a damn if I ever see any of you again.
Jennifer Egan
#97. Now there are permanent gray smudges in Scotty's vision. He says he likes them
actually, what he says is: "I consider them a visual enhancement." We think they remind him of his mom.
Jennifer Egan
#98. Reach isn't describable in terms of cause and effect anymore: it's simultaneous.
Jennifer Egan
#99. The girls looked aghast. I watched them cast baleful looks their mother's way, and saw, in their silky, seamless faces, the thick patina so many years of privilege had left behind. Suddenly I was enraged - enraged at both of them for not knowing what these privileges had cost.
Jennifer Egan
#100. 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
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