Jennifer Egan Quotes
Jennifer Egan Quotes
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.
2976 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?
2653 Rich children are always blond, Jocelyn goes. It has to do with vitamins.
1249 That's what death is, Danny thought: wanting to talk to someone and not being able to.
3622 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.
4887 Time’s a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?” Scotty shook his head. “The goon won.
1064 I don't know what happened to me," he said, shaking his head. "I honestly don't." ...
"You grew up, Alex.
1962 Time's a goon right? Isn't that the expression?
2094 Soiled, forgotten coats of arms were carved above their massive doorways, and these unsettled Ted: such universal, defining symbols made meaningless by nothing more than time.
2305 Vinegar: that's what fear smells like.
4453 Jules turned to her, incredulous. 'Do you socialize with Republicans?'
"'It happens, Jules.
4754 This is the music business. 'Five years is five hundred years' - your words.
4477 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!
4153 I picture it like Judgement Day,' he says finally, his eyes on the water. 'We'll rise up out of our bodies and find each other again in spirit form. We'll meet in that new place, all of us together, and first it'll seem strange, and pretty soon it'll seem strange that you could ever lose someone, or get lost.
1095 And it may be that a crowd at a particular moment of history creates the object to justify its gathering, as it did at the first Human Be-In and Monterey Pop and Woodstock. Or it may be that two generations of war and surveillance had left people craving the embodiment of their own unease in the form of a lone, unsteady man on a slide guitar.
4235 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.
1551 Like all failed experiments, that one taught me something I didn’t expect: one key ingredient of so-called experience is the delusional faith that it is unique and special, that those included in it are privileged and those excluded from it are missing out.
1393 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.
2740 She was clean": no piercings, tattoos, or scarifications. All the kids were now. And who could blame them, Alex thought, after watching three generations of flaccid tattoos droop like moth-eaten upholstery over poorly stuffed biceps and saggy asses?
4577 Sure, everything is ending," Jules said, "but not yet.
3767 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!
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