Quotes from Jennifer Egan

He'd chanced upon his favorite hour: A premonition of dawn without any visible sign of it.

The forest is like a sentient creature drawing breath around me. The moon's brightness has a sound. It rings in the sky. I've had a fever, which has been hard, but it has left my mind clearer than before. There's another way of seeing the world, like looking through the bottom of a glass.

Then she gathered us into her arms and we held her, feeling the heat from under her skin, and we were the three-headed monster again, with its three yearning hearts. We held our mother as long as we could, and then longer, until she started to laugh. My beautiful grown-up daughters, she said.

I wanted to send a young Charlotte into the world to live a different life from mine.

Anna liked Bascombe, which was partly to say that she liked herself in his company.

If wishing could make men die, there'd be nary a live one left." As suddenly

She loved to read and did so quite uncritically, taking each book as a prescription of sorts, an argument for a certain kind of life.

When the balloons are out, as they often are, we raise our glasses at the sky before we drink.

The sky above the buildings outside their apartment windows is the color of a dusty chalkboard, and the light coming down onto the street is exactly the color of boredom.

eyebrows have never inflicted a moment of pain on me.

But Stephanie hailed from suburban, midwestern nowhere, and there had been a club whose snack bar served thin, greasy burgers rather than salade niçoise with fresh seared tuna, like this one, but where tennis had been played on sun-cracked courts, and where Stephanie had achieved a certain greatness at around age thirteen. She hadn't played since.

He didn't sound afraid, but I smelled that he was. Vinegar: that's what fear smells like.

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.

There was widespread chagrin over not being able to buy Panamanian rum from the bumboats that swarmed both ends of the canal, but it soon dissolved into the monotony peculiar to long voyages. Everyone resisted this at first; they were bored, stymied, restless. But within a few days, peace overcame the ship like a sigh—the relief of knowing this was all there was, or would be, for some weeks. Men

Sometimes, before coming inside, Eddie would stand in the hall and overhear a festive gaiety from behind the closed door. It always surprised him. Did I imagine that? he would ask himself later. Or had they been easier—happier—without him?

She'd risked everything, and here was the result: the raw, warped core of her life.

We all got into it, cracking walnut shells with our shoes, pulling the sweet white meat from inside while a crowd of our Chinese hosts eyed us with bemused perplexity. "Americans," I imagined them saying, afterward. "The poor sons of bitches have everything in the world, but they've never tasted fresh walnuts.

There is no end to it, no way to measure it. Consciousness is like the cosmos multiplied by the number of people alive in the world (assuming that consciousness dies when we do, and it may not) because each of our minds is a cosmos of its own: unknowable, even to ourselves.

Sasha tipped back her head to look at him. She made a point of doing this now and then, just to remind Coz that she wasn't an idiot—she knew the question had a right answer. She and Coz were collaborators, writing a story whose end had already been determined: she would get well.

In moments, I clutched at the notion of some larger "me" that could contain and justify my contradictory behavior, but more often I simply felt like the scene of two irreconcilable visions, two different people, one unerringly loyal and faithful, the other treacherous and greedy.

He hugs her to him. When Charlie was little he did this all the time, but as she grows older it happens less. Her father is warm, almost hot, his heartbeat like someone banging on a heavy door.

I rang the bell. When it was clear that no one was home, I opened the door and went in.

You can only write regularly if you're willing to write badly… Accept bad writing as a way of priming the pump, a warm-up exercise that allows you to write well.

The secret to a happy ending, Mom used to tell us, is knowing when to walk away.