Quotes from Jennifer Egan

She could feel the logic of mechanical parts in her fingertips; this came so naturally that she could only think that other people didn't really try.

With a sudden pressure heralded by pricks of sweat along my drastically receding hairline, I swab the bottom of my salad plate with a vast hunk of bread and jam it into my mouth like a dentist packing a tooth. And just then-ah yes-I feel the niggling onset of a sneeze; here it comes, Hail Mary, bread or no bread, nothing can halt the shouting simultaneous eruption of every cavity in my head.

I get to know a lot of people. But it never really lasts.

It made me alert, like someone had scrubbed mint all over my skin. I'd walk into that stinking, miserable prison and for the next three hours, a wise and beautiful woman would float out of the wreckage of my life, and her words and thoughts and tiniest movements were precious.

Since then, I've subjected my impulses to leave for work to a three-step protocol: 1) Is it necessary that I go at this moment? 2) Is there something at home that I want to avoid? 3) Will I be letting anyone down by leaving right now?

Jocelyn and I have done everything together since fourth grade: hopscotch, jump rope, charm bracelets, buried treasure, Harriet the Spying, blood sisters, crank calls, pot, coke, quaaludes.

As she worked, Anna glanced occasionally at the Flossie Flirt doll wedged at the end of a shelf. She had wanted one so violently two years ago that some of her desperation seemed to have broken off and stayed inside her. It was strange and painful to discover that old longing now, in this place.

underneath that I'd said something else: we were both a couple of asswipes, and now only I'm an asswipe; why? And underneath that, something else: once an asswipe, always an asswipe.

Lust made an idiot of everyone it touched—Dexter felt stupidity shrouding his head like a hood in the shape of a dunce's cap.

We work in the realm of the impression." Nell hailed a taxi and directed the driver to East

Reading is the nourishment that lets you do interesting work.

Trouble is," Mr. Q. breathed, "you open a channel . . . now it exists. Hard to regulate what . . . passes through or . . . what direction it . . . moves." Dexter said nothing. What the hell was he getting at? "This may be your . . . blind spot.

It wasn't depression, exactly; more a weird, restless pressure that made me wander the house late at night, opening the best bottles of wine in our cellar and drinking them alone while I channel-surfed along the forgotten byways of cable TV.

It had been years since she'd fabricated a story from whole cloth. It brought a sense of returning to an earlier time when she was questioned more often and had fewer evasions at her disposal. Besides, she thought, looking into Rose's relieved and joyful face, people practically told you the lies they wanted to hear.

Time's a goon, right? Isn't that the expression?

corrupt interloper bluffing her way through her life.

A weird sequence of weather events had left a thin skin of ice around every tree and branch and twig. Each time the wind blew, a splintery groan issued from all directions at once.

She'd never been good at banter; it was like a skipping rope whose rhythm she couldn't master enough to jump in with confidence. The war seemed not to exist here, despite the presence of officers in uniform.

Don't get me wrong—I enjoy my real life, but I feel about it much the way I do about New York City, my chosen and adored home: I'm always happy to leave, and I'm always happy to come back.

By then I'd been watching shadow selves for many years. They'd rescued me from boredom, from sadness. From tables full of rich, awful people. They'd given depth to the shallow, dimensions to the simpleminded. Mystery to the blatant. They were my own secret project. But Z knew about them, too. He was looking for mine. A spy. Like me.

It was starting to rain, big sloppy drops spilling onto the windshield. No thunder yet. His driving was stymied by a clobbering sensation of loss. But what exactly had he lost? Himself as he had been, firm-bodied and flabby-minded? Some clarity of vision he once had possessed? Or was it the old, dormant chamber of his bicameral mind calling out to him, reminding him of the days when rocks and trees and statues had spoken with the voices of gods?

Let me tell you something, dearie: the world is a closed door to an unwed mother and her illegitimate child. If

The girls looked aghast. I watched them cast baleful looks their mother's way, and saw, in their silky, seamless faces, the thick patina so many years of privilege had left behind. Suddenly I was enraged—enraged at both of them for not knowing what these privileges had cost.

I felt no shame whatsoever in these activities, because I understood what almost no one else seemed to grasp: that there was only an infinitesimal difference, a difference so small that it barely existed except as a figment of the human imagination, between working in a tall green glass building on Park Avenue and collecting litter in a park. In fact, there may have been no difference at all.