Quotes from Jennifer Egan

Mr. Kinghorn injected into Alfred's next several inhalations: "Sir, you've made your racket for going on two minutes now… I'll allow you thirty more seconds… at which point you'll either have to stop hollering or leave my bus… Am I making myself clear?

He had to find her. But where? Ted deliberated this question while downing three espressos in the hotel lobby, letting the caffeine and vodka greet in his brain like fighting fish. Where to look for Sasha in this sprawling, malodorous city? He reviewed the strategies he'd already failed to execute: approaching dissolute kids at the train station and youth hostels, but no, no. He'd waited too long for any of that." (p. 224)

Even smiling, there's no hope for Marty's face. But I'm worried he might think the same of me, so I don't smile back.

Holding my phone, looking out at twinkling Lake Michigan, I understood with sudden clarity that doing the right thing—being right—gets you nothing in this world. It's the sinners everyone loves: the flailers, the scramblers, the bumblers. There was nothing sexy about getting it right the first time.

Dennis sold vintage weed: Humboldt Homegrown, Eureka Gold, weed from back in the day when marijuana was leafy and harsh and full of seeds but delivered a high that was the weed equivalent of vinyl: "whorled" and "crosshatched," "sonorous" and "plump" (Dennis's MFA in poetry served him well in these marketing descriptions)—in other words, authentic in ways that the bloodless, odorless tinctures that passed for weed nowadays were not.

It's turning out to be a bad day, a day when the sun feels like teeth.

Knowing all of this makes us one step closer to being real, but not completely. When does a fake Mohawk become a real Mohawk? Who decides? How do you know it's happened?

Not enough has been written about the treachery of middle life," the old man mused, his voice carrying over the wind. "Dante went to hell to escape it, and I've seen plenty of other men do the same, metaphorically speaking. Be patient, Dexter. Wars have a way of shifting the terrain into configurations we can't foresee, hard as we might try. This is no time for bold moves.

Th?i gian là má»™t k? kh?ng b?, ph?i không? C?u s? không ?? h?n xô ngã c?u ch?? Scotty l?c ??u. - K? kh?ng b? ?y Ä'ã th?ng.

But we all know the drill: if we eat only candy, if we cultivate our friendships and relationships primarily online, if we forget to walk to town sometimes instead of drive, a crucial part of us will wither. You don't have to read all the books on your list at once. Just pick up the one that grabs you right now. If you don't love it, put it down. Move on.

Trudy was an avid Facebook poster, a touter of family vacations and toddler artworks, a coiner of sappy hashtags like #motherdaughterlove and #thankgoodnessforgrandparents that Alfred logged on to Facebook specifically to be enraged by.

one key ingredient of so-called experience is the delusional faith that it is unique and special, that those included in it are privileged and those excluded from it are missing out.

Sure," Chris said reflexively, aware that Raffish Outsiders seldom repeated an offer.

A bright moon can astonish, no matter how many times you have seen it. If you were a child who loved the moon, looking at the moon will remind you of childhood. Fatherless girls may invest the moon with a certain paternal promise. Everyone has a father. A vague story like "Your father died before you were born" may satisfy even a canny child for an unlikely number of years. The truth of your paternity, discovered in adulthood, will make the lie seem retroactively ludicrous.

In deep night, when I listen to sounds of the rainforest, I feel like I've returned to my mission. The landscapes are nothing alike. I see now that the place I've been yearning for is my own imagination. It was with me before and will be always. It's in every children's book.

A sudden reconfiguration of your past can change the fit and feel of your adulthood. It may cleave you from the mother whose single goal has been your happiness. If your husband has transformed greatly in his own life, he will understand your transformation.

He was sliding into the city's knotty entrails, a poor, untouristed area where the sound of flapping laundry mingled with the bristly chatter of pigeons' wings. Without warning, Sasha pivoted around to face him. She stared, bewildered, into his face. 'Is that?' she stammered. 'Uncle—' 'My God! Sasha!' Ted cried, wildly mugging surprise. He was a lousy fake." (p. 213)

At night, far from shore, stars pulse with a strength inconceivable in the proximity of light.

Charlotte would always try to make it personal. It was the reigning habit of mind in this land without history, this era when all relationships of time and space, of cause and effect, had been obliterated by the touch of a key. And so people were adrift, lacking any context by which to orient themselves, seeking to fill the breach with personal history, that diminutive, myopic substitute.

Losing Pamela had left a shadow of sadness that he'd grown so used to, he'd stopped noticing it. And now it had lifted.

By now it was afternoon. Ted began to walk, still dazed, until he found himself among a skein of backstreets so narrow they felt dark. He passed churches blistered with grime, moldering palazzi whose squalid interiors leaked sounds of wailing cats and children. Soiled, forgotten coats of arms were carved above their massive doorways, and these unsettled Ted: such universal, defining symbols made meaningless by nothing more than time." (p. 212)

Silence after a roaring motor is a sound of its own.

Structural Dissatisfaction: Returning to circumstances that once pleased you, having experienced a more thrilling or opulent way of life, and finding that you can no longer tolerate them. But

If you ever find yourself thinking that a mass human extinction event would be good for population control, you might want to get checked out.