Quotes from Jennifer Egan

reach isn't describable in terms of cause and effect anymore: it's simultaneous.

And sitting there, sea drifting in around them, Wolf had understood for the first time what kind of life he wanted to live with Faith. Maybe they wouldn't rise up into the sky the way he'd thought, maybe the real thing was doing what his parents had done, pay the rent, read the paper, hell, maybe that was the dare. To live--day in, day out. Just live.

I wonder what Proust would have made of our present-day locus of collective fantasy, the Internet. I'm guessing he would have seized on its wistful aspect, pointing out gently and with wry humor that much of what beguiles us is the act of reaching for what isn't there.

The need for personal glory is like cigarette addiction: a habit that feels life-sustaining even as it kills you.

I'm like America " he said. Stephanie swung around to look at him unnerved. "What are you talking about " she said. "Are you off your meds " "Our hands are dirty " Jules said.

Mindy felt a jolt of attraction roughly akin to having someone seize her intestines and twist.

Oh we'll know each other forever, Bix says. The days of losing touch are almost gone.

They were snobs or idiots or both...yet she was inexplicably crushed by their coldness.

Cheating is like a girl's maidenhead. Doesn't matter if she's done it once or a hundred times; she's ruined just the same.

Howie's troubles were a favorite family topic, and behind the shaking heads and oh it's so sad s you could hear the joy pushing right up through because doesn't every family like having one person who's fucked up so fantastically that everyone else feels like a model citizen next to him?

Nineteen eighty is almost here, thank God. 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.

You can do it alone. But it's going to be so much harder.

water laughing softly down a black stone wall.

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

A frenzy of activity that had mostly led him in circles: wasn't that a fairly accurate description of lust?

I haven't had writer's block. I think it's because my process involves writing very badly.

And it may be that a crowd at a particular moment of history creates the object to justify its gathering, as it did at the first Human Be-In and Monterey Pop and Woodstock. Or it may be that two generations of war and surveillance had left people craving the embodiment of their own unease in the form of a lone, unsteady man on a slide guitar.

Time's a goon right?You gonna let that goon push you around?

Jules turned to her, incredulous. 'Do you socialize with Republicans?' "'It happens, Jules.

I guess it's always romantic when two people fall in love.... Even if it turns out not to be real.

It is technically impossible for a man to look better in a Speedo than in swim trunks.

They were not permitted to so much as knock upon the door to the room in which he thought and wrote about art, but ted hadn't found a way to keep them from prowling outside it, ghostly feral creatures drinking from a pond at moonlight, their bare feet digging in the carpet....

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.

Her face was fragile and mischievous, pale enough to absorb hues from the world around her-purple, green, pink-like a face painted by Lucian Freud.