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

Jennifer Egan Quotes

One horror of motherhood lies in the moments when she can see both the exquisiteness of her child and his utter inconsequence to others.

— Jennifer Egan

Tongue-in-cheek nostalgia is merely the portal, the candy house, if you will, through which we hope to lure in a new generation and bewitch them.

— Jennifer Egan

A new remote and unfamiliar place can make the prior remote and unfamiliar place seem like home.

— Jennifer Egan

People rarely look the way you expect them to, even when you’ve seen pictures. The first thirty seconds in a person’s presence are the most important. If you’re having trouble perceiving and projecting, focus on projecting.

— Jennifer Egan

But knowing everything is too much like knowing nothing; without a story, it’s all just information.

— Jennifer Egan

Nowadays, a man ill at ease in his surroundings will pull out his phone, request the Wi-Fi password, and rejoin a virtual sphere where his identity is instantly reaffirmed. Let us all take a moment to consider deeply what isolation was customary before these times arrived!

— Jennifer Egan

I understood with sudden clarity that doing the right thing – being right – gets you nothing in this world. It’s the sinners everyone loves: the flailers, the scramblers, the bumblers. There was nothing sexy about getting it right the first time.

— Jennifer Egan

A smile is a door that is both open and closed.

— Jennifer Egan

Alone by choice on Saturday nights, writing by an open window in his studio apartment, Gregory had experienced a kind of euphoria: a swelling, bursting, yearning hunger that had something in common with lust but included everyone, from the revelers outside his window to the carousers down the hall. He was where he wanted to be, and needed nothing else.

— Jennifer Egan

Already midcareer, Ted published Van Gogh, Painter of Sound, which found correlations between Van Gogh’s types of brushstroke and the proximity of noisemaking creatures like cicadas, bees, crickets, and woodpeckers – whose microscopic traces had been detected in the paint itself.

— Jennifer Egan

To hell with God,” Fern said. “I’m worried about the Internet.” “By which you mean an all-seeing, all-knowing entity that may be predicting and controlling your behavior, even when you think you’re choosing for yourself?

— Jennifer Egan

Making her mark ended up not involving any of the things she’d banked on – her dancing, her beauty, her sexual confidence – in fact, all of those succumbed to it. Heroin is her great love, her life’s work, and she has given up everything for it, through renunciation or sheer neglect.

— Jennifer Egan

Jocelyn and I have done everything together since fourth grade: hopscotch, jump rope, charm bracelets, buried treasure, Harriet the Spying, blood sisters, crank calls, pot, coke, quaaludes.

— Jennifer Egan

If my life has taught me anything, it’s that curiosity and expediency have a sneaky, inexorable power. Resisting them is easy for a minute – a hundred minutes – even a year. But not forever.

— Jennifer Egan

He felt the mystery of his own unconscious like a whale looming invisibly beneath a tiny swimmer. If he couldn’t search or retrieve or view his own past, then it wasn’t really his. It was lost.

— Jennifer Egan

Only his folks altered with the years, their hair going silver, Robert Sr., a high school football coach, ultimately on oxygen for emphysema, both of them seeming to shrink on the couch cushions in a way that made the crystal and porcelain artifacts look bigger each year.

— Jennifer Egan

You call them friends, Hannah,” Mom lashes out, confronting me from the doorway with hands on hips. “But your connection to them is situational. Years from now you’ll look back and marvel at what you could have seen in most of these people.

— Jennifer Egan

Lizzie and her friends barely knew what the Internet was in 1992, but Bix could feel the vibrations of an invisible web of connection forcing its way through the familiar world like cracks riddling a windshield. Life as they knew it would soon shatter and be swept away, at which point everyone would rise together into a new metaphysical sphere.

— Jennifer Egan

I see now that the place I’ve been yearning for is my own imagination.

— Jennifer Egan

Social media was dead, everyone agreed; self-representations were inherently narcissistic or propagandic or both, and grossly inauthentic.

— Jennifer Egan
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