Jennifer Egan Quotes & Sayings

Kissing Mother Superior, incompetent, hairball, poppy seeds, on the can. — Jennifer Egan

Vinegar: that's what fear smells like. — Jennifer Egan

Hindsight creates the illusion that your life has led you inevitably to the present moment. — Jennifer Egan

I sensed immediately that he'd once been overweight. He moved with a fat person's tiptoey apology. — Jennifer Egan

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

Power is like that; everyone feels it at once. — Jennifer Egan

He'd discovered the tables now and was staring at the pile. It looked like the work of a miniaturist beaver: a heap of objects that was illegible yet clearly not random. To Sasha's eye, it almost shook under its load of embarrassments and close shaves and little triumphs and moments of pure exhilaration. It contained years of her life compressed. The screwdriver was at the outer edge. Sasha moved closer to Alex, drawn to the sight of him taking everything in. — Jennifer Egan

The whole fucking world is upside down. Buildings are missing. You get strip-searched everytime you go to someone's office. Everybody sounds stoned, because they're emailing people the whole time they're talking to you. Tom and Nicole are with different people ... and now my rock-and-roll sister and her husband are hanging around with Republicans. What the fuck! — Jennifer Egan

By then I'd been watching shadow selves for many years. They'd rescued me from boredom, from sadness. From tables full of rich, awful people. They'd given depth to the shallow, dimensions to the simpleminded. Mystery to the blatant. They were my own secret project. But Z knew about them, too. He was looking for mine. A spy. Like me. — Jennifer Egan

The blue, mosquitoey night pushes in from the hotel windows. — Jennifer Egan

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. — Jennifer Egan

He sensed between them an understanding too deep to articulate: the unspeakable knowledge that everything is lost. — Jennifer Egan

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

The site of his thinking and writing was a small office wedged in one corner of his shaggy house, on whose door he'd installed a lock to keep his sons out. They gathered wistfully outside it, his boys, with their chipped, heartbreaking faces. They were not permitted to so much as knock upon the door to the room in which he thought and wrote about art, but Ted hadn't found a way to keep them from prowling outside it, ghostly feral creatures drinking from a pond in moonlight, their bare feet digging at the carpet, their fingers sweating on the walls, leaving spoors of grease that Ted would point out each week to Elsa, the cleaning woman. He would sit in his office, listening to the movements of his boys, imagining that he felt their hot, curious breath. I will not let them in, he would tell himself. I will sit and think about art. But he found, to his despair, that often he couldn't think about art. He thought about nothing at all. — Jennifer Egan

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

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

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. — Jennifer Egan

A dog's love is forever. We expect infidelity from one another; we marvel at this one's ability to hold that one's interest for fifty, sixty years; perhaps some of us feel a secret contempt for monogamy even as we extol it, wishing parole for its weary participants. But dogs do not receive our sympathy or our suspicion - from dogs we presume an eternal adoration. — Jennifer Egan

Kind of like saying 'no offense' when you've just said something offensive? — Jennifer Egan

If having a story that's compelling - you want to know what will happen - is traditional, then ultimately I am a traditionalist. That is what readers care about. It's what I care about as a reader. Now if I can have that along with a strong girding of ideas and some kind of exciting technical forays - then that is just the jackpot. — Jennifer Egan

To me, fiction writing at any length, in any form, is a feat of radical compression: take the sprawling chaos of human experience, run it through the sieve of perception, and distill it into something comparatively miniscule that somehow, miraculously, illuminates the vast complexity around it. I don't think about short stories any differently than I do about novels or novellas or even memoirs. But the smaller scale of a story is important; the distillation must be even more extreme in order to succeed. It also must be purer; there is almost no room for mistakes. — Jennifer Egan

You kneel beside her, breathing the familiar smell of Sasha's sleep, whispering into her ear some mix of I'm sorry and I will never leave you, I'll be curled around your heart for the rest of your life, until the water pressing my shoulders and chest crushes me awake and I hear Sasha screaming into my face: Fight! Fight! Fight! — Jennifer Egan

I find myself thinking more about the past as I get older ... maybe because there's just more of it to think about. At the same time, I'm less haunted by it than I was as a younger person. I guess that's probably the ideal: to reach a point where you have access to all of your memories, but you don't feel victimized by them. — Jennifer Egan

Proust, my big inspiration for 'Goon Squad,' uses music a lot in his novel, both in terms of plot and structure. I liked the idea of doing the same thing, which is one reason I structured 'Goon Squad' as a record album, with an A side and a B side, that's built around the contrasting sounds of the individual numbers in it. — Jennifer Egan

Mindy felt a jolt of attraction roughly akin to having someone seize her intestines and twist. — Jennifer Egan

It's all still there: the pool with its blue and yellow tiles from Portugal, water laughing softly down a black stone wall. The house is the same, except quiet. The quiet makes no sense. Nerve gas? Overdoses? Mass arrests? I wonder as we follow a maid through a curve of carpeted rooms, the pool blinking at us past every window. What else could have stopped the unstoppable parties? But it's nothing like that. Twenty years have passed. — Jennifer Egan

And Alex understood that Scotty Hausmann did not exist. He was a word casing in human form: a shell whose essence has vanished. — Jennifer Egan

There are so many ways to go wrong. All we've got are metaphors, and they're never exactly right. You can never just Say. The. Thing. — Jennifer Egan

I write totally spontaneously. I actually write fiction by hand - that always seems to startle people. I think the reason I do that is to bypass the thinking part of me and get to the more unconscious part, which is where all the good ideas seem to be. — Jennifer Egan

But try as Phoebe might to blend with her peers, it felt like bluffing, mouthing the words to a song she'd never been taught, always a beat late. At best, she fooled them. But the chance to distinguish herself, impress them in the smallest way, was lost. At her vast public high school Phoebe had felt reduced to a pidgin version of herself, as during "conversations" in French class - Where is the cat? Have you seen the cat? Look! Pierre gives the cat a bath - such was her level of fluency while discussing bongs or bands or how fucked-up someone was at a party. — Jennifer Egan

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

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

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

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. — Jennifer Egan

With a sudden pressure heralded by pricks of sweat along my drastically receding hairline, I swab the bottom of my salad plate with a vast hunk of bread and jam it into my mouth like a dentist packing a tooth. And just then-ah yes-I feel the niggling onset of a sneeze; here it comes, Hail Mary, bread or no bread, nothing can halt the shouting simultaneous eruption of every cavity in my head. — Jennifer Egan

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

What he needed was to find fifty more people like him, who had stopped being themselves without realizing it. — Jennifer Egan

It was starting to rain, big sloppy drops spilling onto the windshield. No thunder yet. His driving was stymied by a clobbering sensation of loss. But what exactly had he lost? Himself as he had been, firm-bodied and flabby-minded? Some clarity of vision he once had possessed? Or was it the old, dormant chamber of his bicameral mind calling out to him, reminding him of the days when rocks and trees and statues had spoken with the voices of gods? — Jennifer Egan

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

But I always need to identify with a character to write about him or her - and by 'identify,' I mean see the world through that person's eyes and have a strong sense of the inner logic of their acts and decisions, wacky or wrongheaded though they might be. In that sense, I think there's some of me in all of them. — Jennifer Egan

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

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

Sasha looked at the windowpane, rinsed continually with rain, smearing lights in the falling dark. She lay with her body tensed, claiming the couch, her spot in this room, her view of the window and the walls, the faint hum that was always there when she listened, and these minutes of Coz's time: another, then another, then one more. — Jennifer Egan

Think about medieval times, Danny, like when this castle was built. People were constantly seeing ghosts, having visions - they thought Christ was sitting with them at the dinner table, they thought angels and devils were flying around. We don't see those things anymore. Why? Was all that stuff happening before and then it stopped? Unlikely. Was everyone nuts in medieval times? Doubtful. But their imaginations were more active. Their inner lives were rich and weird. — Jennifer Egan

Stu walked Bennie over to Chris in the chair and parted his hair to reveal some tan little creatures the size of poppy seeds moving around on his scalp. Bennie felt himself grow faint.'Lice' the barber whispered.'They get it at school'. 'But he goes to private school' Bernie had blurted.'In Crandale,New York! — Jennifer Egan

All her excitement had seeped away, leaving behind a terrible sadness, an emptiness that felt violent, as if she'd been gouged. — Jennifer Egan

There's a fine line between thinking about somebody and thinking about not thinking about somebody, but I have the patience and the self-control to walk that line for hours - days, if I have to. — Jennifer Egan

Charlie doesn't know herself. Four years from now, at eighteen, she'll join a cult across the Mexican border whose charismatic leader promotes a diet of raw eggs; she'll nearly die from salmonella poisoning before Lou rescues her. A cocaine habit will require partial reconstruction of her nose, changing her appearance, and a series of feckless, domineering men will leave her solitary in her late twenties, trying to broker peace between Rolph and Lou, who will have stopped speaking. — Jennifer Egan

We're [writers] all afraid of writing badly, and there are psychological reasons, like the bad interior of ourselves is somehow being revealed, but we all fear that, and you can't write well if you're not willing to write badly. That's why you have to make writing a habit, so it feels normal and not strange. — Jennifer Egan

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

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

He remembered his mentor, Lou Kline, telling him in the nineties that rock and roll had peaked at Monterey Pop. They'd been in Lou's house in LA with its waterfalls, the pretty girls Lou always had, his car collection out front, and Bennie had looked into his idol's famous face and thought, You're finished. Nostalgia was the end - everyone knew that. — Jennifer Egan

I guess it's always romantic when two people fall in love ... Even if it turns out not to be real. — Jennifer Egan

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

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

I came for this reason: I want to know what happened between A and B."

Bennie seemed to be waiting for more.

"A is when we were both in the band, chasing the same girl. B is now."

I knew instantly that it had been the right move to bring up Alice. I'd said something literally, yes, but 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. And deepest of all: You were the one chasing. But she picked me. — Jennifer Egan

...our familiar features rinsed in weird adulthood. — Jennifer Egan

Too clear, too clean. The problem was precision, perfection; — Jennifer Egan

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

See how everything now is precious, how someday I'll know I was lucky to be here. — Jennifer Egan

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

The book that is the closest genetically to 'Goon Squad' is 'Look at Me.' It has the futuristic element - although, freakishly, almost every aspect I invented has come to pass in some way, including the terrorist who fantasies about blowing up the World Trade Centre. That was extremely uncomfortable. The book came out on the week of 9/11. — Jennifer Egan

It wasn't depression, exactly; more a weird, restless pressure that made me wander the house late at night, opening the best bottles of wine in our cellar and drinking them alone while I channel-surfed along the forgotten byways of cable TV. — Jennifer Egan

Everybody sounds stoned, because they're e-mailing people the whole time they're talking to you. — Jennifer Egan

Reading is the nourishment that lets you do interesting work. — Jennifer Egan

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

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

I haven't had writer's block. I think it's because my process involves writing very badly. — Jennifer Egan

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

I'm very interested in the way the Internet has changed teenage life. Obviously it's very different from when I grew up, when there weren't even answering machines, much less computers. I was telling my children this the other day, and the little one said, "Did you have electricity, Mom?" and I was like okay, enough, kid. — Jennifer Egan

She looks up. I've caught her by surprise. Her face opens up and all of a sudden it's like that paper mask is transparent. I'm looking right through it, and I get a flash of some kind of life we could've had - barbecues, dogs, kids flopping over us in bed - it rolls through me fast but strong and clear, like one of those cooking smells that blows in the window so sharp you can pick out the ingredients. And then it's gone. It's gone, and Holly's holding my hand. Finally, after that long long wait, her hand is back on mine. Dry cool fingers, slim. The rings loose. I close my eyes. My hand is so hot, I feel my pulse in every finger. I'm afraid she'll let go but she doesn't let go. She keeps her hand around mine and it's like she's holding all of me in her cool sweetness, calming my fever back down. — Jennifer Egan

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

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

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

if thr r childrn thr mst be a fUtr rt? — Jennifer Egan

A bit of theory as we settle down for lunch: the waiter's treatment of Kitty is actually a kind of sandwich, with the bottom bread being the bored and slightly effete way he normally acts with customers, the middle being the crazed and abnormal way he feels around this famous nineteen-year-old girl, and the top bread being his attempt to contain and conceal this alien middle layer with some mode of behavior that at least approximates the bottom layer of boredom and effeteness that is his norm. — Jennifer Egan

Oh we'll know each other forever, Bix says. The days of losing touch are almost gone. — Jennifer Egan

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

That we have some history together that hasn't happened yet. — Jennifer Egan

I go away for a few years and the whole fucking world is upside down Jules said angrily. Buildings are missing. You get strip-searched every time you go to someone's office. Everybody sounds stoned because they're emailing people the whole time they're talking to you. Tom and Nicole are with different people ... And now my rock-and-roll sister and her husband are hanging around with Republicans. What the fuck - Jules Jones — Jennifer Egan

At the beginning he'd thought of his style as being his essence, the perfect expression of who he was inside, but lately the styles had started to feel like disguises, distractions Danny could move around behind without being seen. 27 — Jennifer Egan

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

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

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

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

Like the apple bruising Kafka's beetle, each of these pellets of recollection lodged in Moose's flesh, releasing its cargo of memories of all the things he had lost - "Not lost! Gained!" Moose thundered aloud, but now, mercifully, that debate (lost or gained?) was supplanted in his mind by the proximity of Belmont Harbor and the yacht club. Yes, this was the place; Moose eased the station wagon into a parking space, desperate to free himself of its chassis, whose sole purpose, it now seemed, was to hold him still so that these bullets of memory could assault him, enter his flesh and release their shrapnel of foolish and unreliable nostalgia. — Jennifer Egan

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

I'm just interested in serialization in fiction. I'm fascinated by it. I love the 19th-century novels. I'm interested in ways to bring that back to fiction. — Jennifer Egan

Everyone we've lost, we'll find. Or they'll find us. — Jennifer Egan

Many years ago he had taken the passion he felt for Susan and folded it in half, so he no longer had a drowning, helpless feeling when he glimpsed her beside him in bed: her ropy arms and soft, generous ass. Then he'd folded it in half again, so when he felt desire for Susan, it no longer brought with it the edgy terror of never being satisfied. Then in half again, so that feeling desire entailed no immediate need to act. Then in half again, so he hardly felt it. His desire was so small in the end that Ted could slip it inside his desk or a pocket and forget about it, and this gave him a feeling of safety and accomplishment, having dismantled a perilous apparatus that might have crushed them both. — Jennifer Egan

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

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

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

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

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

No one is waiting for me. In this story, I'm the girl no one is waiting for. — Jennifer Egan

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

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

And sitting there, sea drifting in around them, Wolf had understood for the first time what kind of life he wanted to live with Faith. Maybe they wouldn't rise up into the sky the way he'd thought, maybe the real thing was doing what his parents had done, pay the rent, read the paper, hell, maybe that was the dare. To live
day in, day out. Just live. — Jennifer Egan

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