Jennifer Egan Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

• 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

  Strong, Writing, Character

  "How 'the Goon Squad' came to be". Interview with Christian DuChateau, www.cnn.com. April 24, 2011.

  4 Copy quote

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

  Jennifer Egan

  Girl, Waiting, Stories

  Jennifer Egan (2010). “A Visit from the Goon Squad”, p.33, Anchor

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Sorry, Believe, Heart

  Jennifer Egan (2010). “A Visit from the Goon Squad”, p.156, Anchor

  7 Copy quote

• When the clock stops on a life, all things emanating from it become precious, finite, and cordoned off for preservation. Each aspect of the dead person is removed from the flux of the everyday, which, of course, is where we miss him most. The quarantine around death makes it feel unlucky and wrong--a freakish incursion--and the dead, thus quarantined, come to seem more dead than they already are.... Borrowing from the dead is a way of keeping them engaged in life's daily transactions--in other words, alive.

  Jennifer Egan

  Missing, Everyday, Alive

  "Dealing with the Dead" by Jennifer Egan, www.newyorker.com. October 11, 2010.

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Women, Home, Plans

  4 Copy quote

• She'd risked everything, and here was the result: the raw, warped core of her life.

  Jennifer Egan

  Results, Core

  Jennifer Egan (2010). “A Visit from the Goon Squad”, p.12, Anchor

  4 Copy quote

• And for an instant he would remember Naples: sitting with Sasha in her tiny room; the jolt of surprise and delight he'd felt when the sun finally dropped into the center of her window and was captured inside her circle of wire. Now he turned to her, grinning. Her hair and face were aflame with orange light. "See," Sasha muttered, eyeing the sun. "It's mine.

  Jennifer Egan

  Light, Hair, Circles

  Jennifer Egan (2011). “A Visit From the Goon Squad”, p.172, Hachette UK

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Thinking, Want, Way

  12 Copy quote

• 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

  Pain, Differences, Numbers

  Jennifer Egan (2010). “A Visit from the Goon Squad”, p.74, Anchor

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Summer, Father, Taken

  20 Copy quote

• 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

  Teenage, Rocks, Years

  "Author Jennifer Egan: Making Her Own Rules". Interview with Jennifer Haupt, www.psychologytoday.com. March 25, 2011.

  4 Copy quote

• 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?

  Jennifer Egan

  Tattoo, Kids, Biceps

  Jennifer Egan (2010). “A Visit from the Goon Squad”, p.258, Anchor

  22 Copy quote

• If you don't have people that the reader cares about and stories that are gripping, you've got nothing.

  Jennifer Egan

  People, Stories, Care

  "Jennifer Egan Does Avant-Garde Fiction - Old School". Interview with Lynn Neary, www.npr.org. July 25, 2010.

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Couple, Writing, Adventure

  "How 'the Goon Squad' came to be". Interview with Christian DuChateau, www.cnn.com. April 24, 2011.

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Memories, Past, Thinking

  4 Copy quote

• I am at my worst trying to write about things that overlap with my life.

  Jennifer Egan

  Writing, Trying, Worst

  4 Copy quote

• I did go on safari in Kenya when I was 17, with my mother, stepfather and little brother, and I kept a careful journal of the experience that was very helpful in terms of my sensory impressions of Africa. I have traveled quite a bit at distinct times in my life, though now that I have kids I've settled down.

  Jennifer Egan

  Mother, Brother, Kids

  "Author Jennifer Egan: Making Her Own Rules". Interview with Jennifer Haupt, www.psychologytoday.com. March 25, 2011.

  4 Copy quote

• th blu nyt th stRs u can't c th hum tht nevr gOs awy

  Jennifer Egan

  4 Copy quote

• Rich children are always blond, Jocelyn goes. It has to do with vitamins.

  Jennifer Egan

  Children, Vitamins, Rich

  Jennifer Egan (2010). “A Visit from the Goon Squad”, p.31, Anchor

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Jennifer Egan

  War, Men, Two

  Jennifer Egan (2010). “A Visit from the Goon Squad”, p.271, Anchor

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Essence, Alex, Shells

  4 Copy quote

• I felt no shame in these activities, because I understood what almost no one else seemed to grasp: that there was only an infinitesimal difference, a difference so small that it barely existed except as a figment of the human imagination, between working in a tall green glass building on Park Avenue and collecting litter in a park. In fact, there may have been no difference at all.

  Jennifer Egan

  Glasses, Differences, Imagination

  4 Copy quote

• And the question is, which one is really "you.

  Jennifer Egan

  4 Copy quote

• 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 didnt exist.

  Jennifer Egan

  Two, Different, Would Be

  61 Copy quote

• 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

  Girl, Years, Lunch

  Jennifer Egan (2010). “A Visit from the Goon Squad”, p.128, Anchor

  4 Copy quote

Page 3 of 5

First

← Prev

1

2

3

4

5

Next →

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin