Quotes from Jennifer Egan

Here," he said, thrusting the binoculars at Tabby to break the spell of her self-absorption. "Make sure no Germans are coming ashore like they did on Amagansett Beach." "Why would they, Daddy? There's nothing important here." "To help with your fingernails? Those seem to be very important." She yanked her fragment of a robe around her and stalked back indoors. Dexter seethed at her vanity and his own impulsiveness. It was a weakness.

NICOLE CULLEN Long Tom Lookout

Think about medieval times, Danny, like when this castle was built. People were constantly seeing ghosts, having visions—they thought Christ was sitting with them at the dinner table, they thought angels and devils were flying around. We don't see those things anymore. Why? Was all that stuff happening before and then it stopped? Unlikely. Was everyone nuts in medieval times? Doubtful. But their imaginations were more active. Their inner lives were rich and weird.

The opposite: disembodied, he believed, Black people would be delivered from the hatred that hemmed and stymied them in the physical world. At last they could move and gather at will, without pressure from the likes of Lizzie's parents: those faceless Texans who opposed Bix without knowing he existed. The

Mysteries that are destroyed by measurement were never truly mysterious;

There were the twins, faces vacant with concentration as they walloped small red balls attached to paddles. Pat-a-pat-a-pat-a-pat-a-pat-a-pat-a-pat-a-pat-a . . . They'd been jai-alai-ing all this time. Despite himself, Dexter smiled.

She gave up the rest. The relief was physical, like releasing a long tight breath that had crowded her lungs for too long, letting it go because it was stale, the oxygen was gone.

He'd discovered the tables now and was staring at the pile. It looked like the work of a miniaturist beaver: a heap of objects that was illegible yet clearly not random. To Sasha's eye, it almost shook under its load of embarrassments and close shaves and little triumphs and moments of pure exhilaration. It contained years of her life compressed. The screwdriver was at the outer edge. Sasha moved closer to Alex, drawn to the sight of him taking everything in.

She wanted to tell him, to have it out in the open. But that wasn't true—she dreaded telling him. What she wanted was already to have told him.

Dexter went rigid. There was a code to Mr. Q.'s utterances: repetition invoked a law of opposites. "Many plans," uttered twice, meant: not this plan. "Many plans," Mr. Q. said again, drawing out the words as he gazed tenderly into Dexter's eyes. No plans

Say, I'd like to speak with your pa this afternoon, if he's a minute to spare." "You know where to look." "Why don't I stop by around three." This plan, so casually made that it hardly qualified as an appointment, could not have been more ironclad had it been typed into an executive diary by a secretarial school graduate fluent in stenography

I was not a nostalgic person. I didn't save Christmas cards, rarely took pictures, felt mostly indifferent to the snapshots people sent me. Until the accident, I had always thought my memory was bad, but in fact I'd thrown the past away, a ream of discarded events--so that I could move, unencumbered, into the future.

Dexter's ultimate job being the protection of his boss's gargantuan illegal earnings from the arachnid appetite of the Bureau of Internal Revenue. No man had the power to intimidate Mr. Q., but the mechanistic forces of taxation and audit were another story. Even the great Al Capone had succumbed. It was the syndicate no syndicate could beat

Her mother glanced at her. "I don't think about him, Anna. That's the truth." "What do you think about?" A spot of red had appeared on each of her mother's cheeks. She was angry. Anna was, too, and the anger strengthened her, as if she were bracing herself against it. "You know perfectly well what I think about," her mother said.

Micks were famously prudish, faithful to their blowsy wives—perhaps recalling the bonny colleens they'd been before the assembly line of children, or from fear of their drunken, bellicose priests

years. In fact the whole apartment, which six years ago had seemed like a way station to some better place, had ended up solidifying around Sasha, gathering mass and weight, until she felt both mired in it and lucky to have it—as if she not only couldn't move on but didn't want to.

16 If your Designated Mate leaves your company a second time, don't follow him. Deactivate your ear mic and resume your "nap." A moment of repose is a good time to reassure your loved ones. Nuanced communication is too easily monitored by the enemy.

The album's called A to B, right?" Bosco said. "And that's the question I want to hit straight on: how did I go from being a rock star to being a fat fuck no one cares about? Let's not pretend it didn't happen.

Eyeing this tableau, I had a sudden epiphany—I understood why Thomas had come to Rockford: for all his fund-raising abilities and management abilities and entrepreneurial genius, his dexterity as a salesman of ideas and gift for answering the collective prayers of the Zeitgeist, Thomas Keene wanted something else entirely from his life. He wanted to be a director.

She wished Bennie were here; only Bennie could appreciate the depth of self-delusion she was witnessing. "Let me get this straight," she said. "You want to do a lot of interviews and press around the fact that you're an ailing and decrepit shadow of your former self. And then you want to do a tour—

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." "You're probably right," I say, because Mom's predictions have turned out to be right a surprising number of times. "But in three weeks, when the party is, they'll still be our friends.

Nineteen eighty is almost here, thank God. The hippies are getting old, they blew their brains on acid and now they're begging on street corners all over San Francisco. Their hair is tangled and their bare feet are thick and gray as shoes. We're sick of them.

But her only real witness, then and now, was Lydia. And her sister could only listen. She could not advise, or answer the questions that troubled Anna most: When would she be allowed to know what she knew? Or when would she have forgotten it?

there are so many things that can take a person somewhere else, but none of those things ever happened to me