Quotes from Jennifer Egan

He wore a thin silk scarf—little more than a cravat—and a bowler, but he was famously, almost comically hardy. Dexter had never seen him sweat even wearing a dinner suit in dead summer. He'd a quick knifelike walk that required Dexter to stride in earnest to keep up, although he was several inches taller.

CRAIG DAVIDSON Medium Tough

Being only where you were was incomplete, but being not at all where you were (because you were getting upset by the conversation you were having on your cell phone) was flat-out hazardous. That's when you walked in front of cars.

Nostalgia was the end—everyone knew that.

Why study authenticity if not to seek it? Try to ring some last truth from that word before it's so leeched of meaning that becomes a word casing, a shell without a bullet. A term that can be used only inside quotation marks.

Here we've been thinking we had nothing in common beyond where we happen to be, and all this time we've been doing the same thing: picking up ghosts.

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.

STEPHEN O'CONNOR Next to Nothing

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.

My point is, screw the machines. Throw them away. Put some faith in that brain of yours. My brain can't make a phone call. Sure it can. You can talk to anyone you want.

Danny used to think of his heart as that strong place, but now he had a better word: the keep. His own keep, inside him, where his treasures would be hidden in case the castle was invaded.

The twins had brought along Buck Rogers ray guns, but the wind turned their shots and death throes into pantomime.

There were rumors at the high school of girls who'd had to depart suddenly to "live with relations." One of these, Loretta Stone, was now a year behind her peers: a chastened solitary girl whose alleged ruin was a succulent dish the other children feasted upon.

Coming home in the almost dark made him feel grown up--a taste of grown-up life. Looking back, that seemed like one of the best parts of being a kid.

She wanted the city to be full of exclusive places turning people away, as long as they always accommodated her. It didn't work like that. What a stupid place to live—stretched thin, overbooked, sold out in advance.

One thing was certain: Rose had been wrong about the world becoming small again. Or at least it would not be the same small world it had been. Too much had changed. And amid those shifts and realignments, Anna had slipped through a crack and escaped.

Knowledge is power, so they say, and yet any counter will tell you that merely possessing data, in itself, is neither useful nor predictive.

Sure enough, the toughness he'd sensed coiled in Ed Kerrigan had flowered into magnificence in the dark-eyed daughter. Proof of what he'd always believed: men's children gave them away. It was why Dexter rarely did business with any man before meeting his family. He wished his Tabby had gone barefoot, too.

What are you doing at work?" she asked him when they were all seated. "Making apps?" "Not exactly." "Isn't that what all Stanford grads do? Make apps?" "You tell me." "I wouldn't know. I went to Chico State." "What do Chico State grads do?" "Become prison guards. Kidding, kidding

Tatum and Oriole and that group are by the pool but they aren't my direct friends and I can't join them without Stella, it would seem weird and they might be nice but they might also freeze me out the way Stella and I might freeze out one of them if she all of a sudden attached herself to us.

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.

But Bennie knew that what he was bringing into the world was shit. 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.

Technology has afforded ordinary people a chance to glow in the cosmos of human achievement.

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