Quotes from Jennifer Egan

Suddenly I'm scared. That the solar panels were a time machine. That I'm a grown-up woman coming back to this place after many years. That my parents are gone, and our house isn't ours anymore. It's a broken down ruin with no one in it. Living here all together was so sweet. Even when we fought. It felt like it would never end. I'll always miss it.

The blue, mosquitoey night pushes in from the hotel windows.

I will never leave you, I'll be curled around your heart for the rest of your life

The best possible outcome of marriage was a wealthy, childless widowhood.

Men said "Girls are weak" when in fact girls made them weak.

One horror of motherhood lies in the moments when she can see both the exquisiteness of her child and his utter inconsequence to others.

Tongue-in-cheek nostalgia is merely the portal, the candy house, if you will, through which we hope to lure in a new generation and bewitch them.

our familiar features rinsed in weird adulthood.

The seconds pass. I know what's going on because it's the same thing that always happens: give me something nice, something I love or want or need, and I'll find a way to grind it into dust.

That's how New York looked: like a gorgeous, easy thing to have, even for me.

And then I notice the music flooding out of every part of the apartment at once — the couch, the walls, even the floor — and I know Bennies alone in Lou's studio, pouring music down around us. A minute ago it was "Don't Let Me Down". Then it was Blondie's "Heart of Glass". Now it's Iggy Pop's "The Passenger". Listening, I think, You will never know how much I understand you.

A new remote and unfamiliar place can make the prior remote and unfamiliar place seem like home.

The fact that so many thoughts could have gone through my head in 3.36 seconds is testament to the infinitude of an individual consciousness. There is no end to it, no way to measure it. Consciousness is like the cosmos multiplied by the number of people alive in the world (assuming that consciousness dies when we do, and it may not) because each of our minds is a cosmos of its own: unknowable, even to ourselves.

If we human beings are information processing machines, reading X's & O's and translating that information into what people oh so breathlessly call "experience", & if I had not only the information but the artistry to shape that information using the computer inside my brain, then, technically speaking, was I not having all the same experiences those other people were having?

friendship risks the end of friendship

Eddie had never noticed how much of his own speech derived from the sea, from "keeled over" to "learning the ropes" to "catching the drift" to "freeloader" to "gripe" to "brace up" to "taken aback" to "leeway" to "low profile" to "the bitter end," or the very last link on a chain.

People rarely look the way you expect them to, even when you've seen pictures. The first thirty seconds in a person's presence are the most important. If you're having trouble perceiving and projecting, focus on projecting.

And, see, those metaphors – 'up front' and 'out in the open' – are part of a system we call atavistic purism. AP implies the existence of an ethically perfect state, which not only doesn't exist and never existed, but it's usually used to shore up the prejudices of whoever's making the judgments.

We're the survivors. Not everyone is. But we are.

Oh we'll know each other for forever' Bix said. 'The days of losing touch are almost gone.' 'What does that mean? ' Drew asks. 'We're going to meet again in a different place,' Bix said. 'Everyone we've lost, we'll find. Or they'll find us.

We'll emerge from this war victorious and unscathed, and become bankers to the world. We'll export our dreams, our language, our culture, our way of life. And it will prove irresistible.

Now there are permanent gray smudges in Scotty's vision. He says he likes them--actually, what he says is: "I consider them a visual enhancement." We think they remind him of his mom.

Thousands of solar panels lift and tilt at the same time, in the same way. I clutch at Dad's arm: "Why are they doing that?" "They're collecting moonlight," Dad says, and I remember: it's weaker, but we use it.

I think ethical ambivalence is a kind of innoculation, a way of excusing yourself in advance for something you actually want to do. No offense.