Quotes from Jennifer Egan

and it's all kind of moving and sweet except that you're not completely there—a part of you is a few feet away, or above, thinking

Even the financial disclosure statements that political bloggers were required to post hadn't stemmed the suspicion that people's opinions weren't really their own. "Who's paying you?" was a retort that might follow any bout of enthusiasm, along with laughter - who would let themselves be bought?

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.

The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh.

He remembered his mentor, Lou Kline, telling him in the nineties that rock and roll had peaked at Monterey Pop. They'd been in Lou's house in LA with its waterfalls, the pretty girls Lou always had, his car collection out front, and Bennie had looked into his idol's famous face and thought, You're finished. Nostalgia was the end - everyone knew that.

Vinegar: that's what fear smells like.

I go away for a few years and the whole fucking world is upside down Jules said angrily. Buildings are missing. You get strip-searched every time you go to someone's office. Everybody sounds stoned because they're emailing people the whole time they're talking to you. Tom and Nicole are with different people...And now my rock-and-roll sister and her husband are hanging around with Republicans. What the fuck - Jules Jones

At night, the house thick with sleep, she would peer out her bedroom window at the trees and sky and feel the presence of a mystery. Some possibility that included her--separate from her present life and without its limitations. A secret. Riding in the car with her father, she would look out at other cars full of people she'd never seen, any one of whom she might someday meet and love, and would feel the world holding her making its secret plans.

time's a goon

Too Clear, too clean. 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!

We lie. That's what we do. You're selling me a line of bullshit and you want me to sell you a line of bullshit back so you can write a major line of bullshit and be paid for it.

No one is waiting for me. In this story, I'm the girl no one is waiting for.

But knowing everything is too much like knowing nothing; without a story, it's all just information.

real computers scared me; if you can find Them, then They can find you...

How do you know a gangster?" "Usually, the room goes a little quiet when he walks in.

Nothing is free! Only children expect otherwise even as myths and fairy tales warn us: Rumpelstiltskin, King Midas, Handsel and Gretel. 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.

He looks tired, like someone walked on his skin and left footprints.

And Alex understood that Scotty Hausmann did not exist. He was a word casing in human form: a shell whose essence has vanished.

Mysteries that are destroyed by measurement were never truly mysterious; only our ignorance made them seem so.

I]t may be that a crowd at a particular moment of history creates the object to justify its gathering.

And for an instant he would remember Naples: sitting with Sasha in her tiny room; the jolt of surprise and delight he'd felt when the sun finally dropped into the center of her window and was captured inside her circle of wire. Now he turned to her, grinning. Her hair and face were aflame with orange light. "See," Sasha muttered, eyeing the sun. "It's mine.

That's what death is, Danny thought: wanting to talk to someone and not being able to.

What I Suddenly Understand My job is to make people uncomfortable. + I will do it all my life. ---> My mother, Sasha Blake, is my first victim.

a swell of gratitude and appreciation for his assistant, as opposed to the murderous rage he felt toward the rest of his staff