Quotes from Jennifer Egan

Again and again he spoke to Charlotte of things, watermelons and grain and cattle and string, reaper-mowers and harvester combines, chisel mortisers and scroll saws and flue stops and piston rings and grain elevators. Objects existing in time and space.

History is retroactive math

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. Why could nobody see this?

Proof of what he'd always believed: men's children gave them away. It was why Dexter rarely did business with any man before meeting his family. He wished his Tabby had gone barefoot, too.

money making money making money into a giant fucking tower of bullshit.

I thought: If I had a view like this to look down on every day, I would have the energy and inspiration to conquer the world. The trouble is, when you most need such a view, no one gives it to you.

The river runs wide and passive in sunlit stretches, then fast and bawdy with whitewater rapids.

She wore a wedding ring (as did he) and a small gold cross at her neck, but a current of wayward sensuality had been unmistakable in her, making these symbols seem apotropaic.

The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh. Film, photography, music: dead. An aesthetic holocaust! Bennie knew better than to say this stuff aloud.

Chris was noticing more and more such correlations, which had the effect of turning the whole world into a matching game. But they also worried him; what did it mean that much of his life could be described in formulaic clichés?

Being observed felt like an action, the only one worth taking.

It began the usual way, in the bathroom of the Lassimo Hotel.

He replayed the moment--an old disquieting conundrum that clouded whatever new thought had been trying to form. Abruptly, he was exhausted, as if he'd been walking for days--as if he'd wandered too far from his own life to reenter it.

As Americans, we prize human rights above all else and cannot sanction their violation. When someone threatens our rights, however, a wider leeway becomes necessary. Follow your instincts while bearing in mind that we must, and will, hew to our principles.

Even now he felt the whiff of his father's disapproval—for having overreached, or become a celebrity (and thereby a target), or failed to heed his father's lectures (delivered liberally to this day from the helm of a small motorboat his father used to fish along the Florida coast), whose refrain, to Bix's ears, was: Think small or get hurt.

His sister's transformation from aging tart to fussing nanny seemed almost instantaneous

They were open but empty-looking, like the windows of a house no one lived in. At

Know that in returning to your body, you are consenting to be racked by physical pain. Know that in returning to your body, you are consenting to undertake a jarring reimmersion into an altered life. Some Citizen Agents have chosen not to return. They have left their bodies behind, and now they glitter sublimely in the heavens. In the new heroism, the goal is to transcend individual life, with its petty pains and loves, in favor of the dazzling collective.

It was the silliest victory of her entire life.

Anti-Vision: a vacancy where a new idea refused to appear. For several moments it filled the screen, depthless and white. Gregory was fascinated. Was it really empty?

Experience leaves a mark, regardless of the reasons and principles behind it.

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.

I began to settle down. The sun was low, the light rosy, the scrubby flora a parched, iridescent silver. The emptiness of the desert felt biblical, as if nothing had ever happened there—as if all of history were yet to come.

Maybe we shared an impatience with small talk, being a heart surgeon and a drug counselor. The body and its needs: the thing itself.