Quotes from Jennifer Egan

He was of no more consequence than an empty cigarette packet.

Bennie has light brown skin and excellent eyes, and he irons his hair in a Mohawk as shiny black as a virgin record.

Time's a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?

It was one of those views that make you feel like God for a second.

At times the brusque mass of everything that was not him seemed likely to crush Eddie into dust the way he crushed the dried-out moths that collected in piles on the protectory

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.

slapping a bright yellow ball around a silver pole.

until it seemed like everything in Danny's life was the witness he needed to prove he was still himself, still Danny King exactly like before: See, I scored a goal! See, I'm hanging with my friends! But he wasn't one hundred percent there, he was watching, too, hoping everyone would be convinced.

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

And it struck him that this was New York: a place that glittered from a distance even when you reached it.

When I'm thirty-four, tonight will be a million years ago, I think–the St. Francis Hotel and the rainy palm tree sounds, Silas with the bandage on his head–and this makes me see how everything now is precious, how someday I'll know I was lucky to be here.

Well, I'm the guy talking. Someone's always doing the talking, just a lot of times you don't know who it is or what their reasons are.

She says, My job is to show you a door you can open. And she taps the top of her head. It leads wherever you want it to go, she says.

It had a tapestry on the wall that showed a king spearing someone's idea of a lion.

Do you trust him?" She hesitates. "Yes and no." "That means no. Trust is all or nothing.

Why did people have to pretend to be what they already were?

The keep is the place where everyone holed up if the castle got invaded.

he needed to be young or nothing about him made any sense

Maintaining an appearance mattered as much—more—than what was underneath. The deeper things could come and go, but what broke the surface would be lodged in everyone's memory.

Holding my phone, looking out at twinkling Lake Michigan, 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. Fuck Sasha, I thought.

I managed to memorize half of "The Eve of St. Agnes," and would mutter stanzas to myself when I was bored, alone, or at aerobics class.

He didn't like kids, and parents of kids weren't high on his list, either. It didn't matter how cool you'd been--you had a kid and you were one more sucker spooning goop into an angry little mouth, a guy with pacifiers in his pockets and snot trails on his sleeves and a happy-goofy look Danny could only think was some kind of shock, like those people who sit around cracking jokes after their legs get blown off.

Your mind will rejoin your body when it is safe to do so.

With Irene's help, I could perform the tasks of an Extraordinary Person. She could read and write, for one thing. And I trusted her.