Quotes from Jennifer Egan

Never part with a fact unless you've no choice.

Whenever his eyes happen to graze Mindy's, she senses shame on her behalf: because of her prettiness; because she sleeps with Lou; because she keeps telling herself this trip constitutes anthropological research into group dynamics and ethnographic enclaves, when really what she's after is luxury, adventure, and a break from her four insomniac roommates.

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.

The fish are gaudy, easy targets, nibbling at coral. Lou has speared seven by the time he realizes Rolph hasn't killed a single one.

She was careful not to indulge this line of thinking. "I don't remember him," she told Coz. "I have nothing to say." She did this for Coz's protection and her own—they were writing a story of redemption, of fresh beginnings and second chances. But in that direction lay only sorrow.

At Playland, Eddie and the little boys had ridden potato sacks down long wooden slides, getting friction burns where a knee or an elbow dragged against the wood. The fun-house floor was pocked with holes through which loud blasts of air (fired by some hidden wiseacre) were meant to lift girls' skirts. Ingrid had a horror of these blasts, and she clung to Eddie, laughing.

In a mere twenty minutes, they'd blown past the desired point of meaningful-connection-through-shared-experience into the less appealing state of knowing-each-other-too-well.

Could' and 'is' are so far apart as to be opposites." "No," she says. " 'Is' and 'isn't' are opposites.

You can , Scotty – you have to,' Bennie said, with his usual calm, but through his thinning silver hair Alex caught a shimmer of sweat on his crown. 'Time's a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?' Scotty shook his head. 'The goon won.'" (p. 329)

You kneel beside her, breathing the familiar smell of Sasha's sleep, whispering into her ear some mix of I'm sorry and I believe in you and I'll always be near you, protecting you, and I will never leave you, I'll be curled around your heart for the rest of your life, until the water pressing my shoulders and chest crushes me awake and I hear Sasha screaming into my face: Fight! Fight! Fight!

Basic exchanges elongate like time-lapse fruits ripening and dropping into outstretched hands.

Sasha was adjusting her yellow eye shadow in the mirror when she noticed a bag on the floor beside the sink that must have belonged to the woman whose peeing she could faintly hear through the vaultlike door of a toilet stall.

The sheer ordinariness of it all confounded Phoebe, as if any one of these things might happen several times a day, with no one watching. They belong to each other, she thought, and found herself awed by the notion -- knowing someone was there, just there, reaching for that person without a thought.

While our exchange is not entirely friendly, there is the encouraging fact that we've reached line seven without awkwardness, defining awkwardness as conversation consisting of a series of futile attempts to solve the problem of what to say next.

because at that point, the point at which my acceleration began to reverse, time started running together—there was no more arc of ascension by which to measure it.

The photos on her page had not done justice to the arresting, wide-eyed symmetry of her face, the radiant shine of her hair. She was 'clean': no piercings, tattoos or scarifications. All the kids were now. And who could blame them, Alex thought, after watching three generations of flaccid tattoos drop like moth-eaten upholstery over poorly stuffed biceps and saggy asses?" (p. 314)

Sasha looked at the windowpane, rinsed continually with rain, smearing lights in the falling dark. She lay with her body tensed, claiming the couch, her spot in this room, her view of the window and the walls, the faint hum that was always there when she listened, and these minutes of Coz's time: another, then another, then one more.

It's a pity we're forced to make the choices that govern the whole of our lives when we're so goddamn young." "If they're the wrong choices, then we have to make new ones," Dexter said. "Even late in the day.

Bernadette longs for this moment as if it had already passed, as if it could have been. Yet here it is.

an edgy eagerness to please that his irony couldn't conceal.

Sie sehnte sich stattdessen nach dem Elan und der Zielstrebigkeit, die alle anderen Menschen in der Forty-second Street zu beflügeln schienen: Gruppen lachender Matrosen; Mädchen mit angelegten, eingesprühten Haaren; ältere Paare, die Damen im Pelz - alle eilten im Dämmerlicht dahin. Anna betrachtete sie forschend. Woher wussten sie, wohin es ging?

if we can work the story around the idea of punishment and redemption, that could be *very* appealing.

It's all still there: the pool with its blue and yellow tiles from Portugal, water laughing softly down a black stone wall. The house is the same, except quiet. The quiet makes no sense. Nerve gas? Overdoses? Mass arrests? I wonder as we follow a maid through a curve of carpeted rooms, the pool blinking at us past every window. What else could have stopped the unstoppable parties? But it's nothing like that. Twenty years have passed.

She's calm and happy now that Scotty loves her. I can't tell if she's actually real, or if she's stopped caring if she's real or not. Or is not caring what makes a person real?