Quotes from Jennifer Egan

Doesn't having been a model make you a little . . . visible?' 'Not at all,' I said. 'Exactly the opposite. People who've known me for years stare at me like they've never seen me before.' The smile was hurting my face.

A frenzy of activity that had mostly led him in circles: wasn't that a fairly accurate description of lust? At times Bennie didn't even mind its disappearance; it was sort of a relief not to be constantly wanting to fuck someone. The world was unquestionably a more peaceful place without the half hard-on that had been his constant companion since the age of thirteen, but did Bennie want to live in such a world?

Never trust a candy house! It was only a matter of time before someone made them pay for what they thought they were getting for free.

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

A good deed needs no excuse. So his pop used to reassure Dexter when he would resist, embarrassed, carrying a covered dish of leftover meatballs to the bums and hoboes who haunted the carny houses near his restaurant. Dexter muttered the phrase to himself as he lifted the heavy folded chair into his trunk. A good deed needs no excuse.

In the weeks since a mysterious fatigue had confined him to his bed, Gregory and Dennis had perfected the art of conversing between rooms.

After eight years in the same one-bedroom apartment, I was suddenly finding it crowded beyond capacity. There was me. There was my unrecognizable face. And there was someone else. It was neither a child nor an animal. It was Despair.

the most beautiful warrior, who has scar tissue designs coiled like railroad tracks over the rigorous architecture of his chest and shoulders and back.

Then winter ended and spring came, and I thought, even if I don't believe there's a poem in anything anymore, maybe I'll write a story. A lot of people do that when they can't seem to figure out who or what they love. It might be an oversimplification, but they seem to write poetry when they do know.

The old pictures were no help; like all good pictures, they hid the truth.

Cooper would never tell Arthur Berringer anything he didn't know, whereas Dexter saw and knew things the old man couldn't afford to, without personal compromise. He was nearer the earth, its salts and minerals, than any Berringer had been in several generations.

Ellen and I were neutralized by our disunion to the same degree that we'd been empowered by our accord.

Time is irrelevant to math.

We're paying him an awful lot of money to tell us we're wonderful. And then, as if another voice had interposed itself, Nice work if you can get it.

Agnes felt her daughter's impatience that she go, and it made her want to cleave, as if holding Anna would somehow awaken in her daughter the need to be held. Agnes clasped her fiercely, trying through sheer force to open the folded part of Anna, so deeply recessed.

The hammerhead crane brandished its fist to the east; to the west loomed the building ways cages. Around all of it, railroad tracks spiraled into whorls of paisley. The diving barge had gone.

Knowing your latitude and longitude is not the same as knowing where you are.

Because our dominance won't arise from subjugating peoples. We'll emerge from this war victorious and unscathed, and become bankers to the world. We'll export our dreams, our language, our culture, our way of life. And it will prove irresistible.

At the end of an evening, her women friends would hug her, or a friend's husband might slip his arm around her waist to kiss her, just a little too suggestively, and the coldness in her would respond, I don't give a damn if I ever see any of you again.

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

Listen to me, Sasha," he said. "You can do it alone. But it's going to be so much harder.

It looked like the work of a miniaturist beaver: a heap of objects that was illegible yet clearly not random.

My apartment was just as I had left it, except that now the empty bottles and chaos of discarded outfits looked like the hopeful prelude to a ruined evening.

aureole of Saint Patrick banishing snakes