Jennifer Egan Quotes

Sure, everything is ending," Jules said, "but not yet.

You can do it alone. But it's going to be so much harder.

Rebecca was an academic star. Her new book was on the phenomenon of word casings, a term she'd invented for words that no longer had meaning outside quotation marks. English was full of these empty words--"friend" and "real" and "story" and "change"--words that had been shucked of their meanings and reduced to husks. Some, like "identity" and "search" and "cloud," had clearly been drained of life by their Web usage. With others, the reasons were more complex; how had "American" become an ironic term? How had "democracy" come to be used in an arch, mocking way?

You can only write regularly if you’re willing to write badly… Accept bad writing as a way of priming the pump, a warm-up exercise that allows you to write well.

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?

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.

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.

That's what death is, Danny thought: wanting to talk to someone and not being able to.

happened as I listened: I felt pain. Not in my head, not in my arm, not in my leg; everywhere at once. I told myself there was no difference between being “inside” and being “outside,” that it all came down to X’s and O’s that could be acquired in any number of different ways, but the pain increased to a point where I thought I might collapse, and I limped away.

And then I notice the music flooding out of every part of the apartment at once — the couch, the walls, even the floor — and I know Bennies alone in Lou’s studio, pouring music down around us. A minute ago it was “Don’t Let Me Down”. Then it was Blondie’s “Heart of Glass”. Now it’s Iggy Pop’s “The Passenger”. Listening, I think, You will never know how much I understand you.

You said you were a fairy princessYou said you were a shooting starYou said we'd go to Bora BoraNow look at where the fuck we are

When does a fake Mohawk become a real Mohawk? Who decides? How do you know if it's happened?

Too Clear, too clean. The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was "digitization" which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh. Film, photography, music: dead. "An aesthetic holocaust!

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.