Quotes from Jennifer Egan

And it was only as he rose from the bed, his body illuminated by the colored lights of the city, that I caught the glint of calculation behind his eyes, a cold, blank set to his face. His shadow self, and not a nice one.

I crossed my arms, stilled by a revelation that had been mounting in me ever since our arrival in this bower of poured concrete: that as the "subject," I was both the center of attention and completely extraneous. The feeling brought with it an eerie, stultifying familiarity; I was still the model, after all. I was modeling my life.

Kind of like saying 'no offense' when you've just said something offensive?

I turn to contemporary fiction seeking a shared awareness with the writer of the cultural moment we both occupy, its peculiar challenges.

I wider that all the time - what will happen next" Kitty says. "sometimes, I imagine myself looking back on right now and I think, like, where will I be standing when I look back? Will right now look like the beginning of a great life or... Or what?

No one is waiting for me. In this story, I'm the girl no one is waiting for. Usually the girl is fat, but my problem is more rare, which is freckles: I look like someone threw handfuls of mud at my face.

Phoebe burst into tears. For several minutes she stood weeping in the middle of the road, the choking, gulping sobs of childhood. Something was wrong; something was wrong but she didn't know what. She was alone in the middle of nowhere, behaving strangely, with no one around to help her, and what people were around she wanted only to escape.

They must have looked like traveling companions, Phoebe thought, possibly even a couple. She noticed her voice leaning into laughter, how she tossed her head, each tiny gesture like the sweet ache of a muscle craving exercise.

He hungered for a sense of progress, of new things approaching while old familiar ones receded. It seemed far too long since he'd had that sensation.

If my life has taught me anything, it's that curiosity and expediency have a sneaky, inexorable power. Resisting them is easy for a minute—a hundred minutes—even a year. But not forever.

But a story was invisible, infinite, it had no size or shape. Information. It could fill the world or fit inside a fingernail.

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

Problems he couldn't solve made him angry.

they'll all divorce—everyone will divorce. An entire generation will throw off the fetters of rote commitment in favor of invention, hope—and we, their children, will try to locate the moment we lost them and worry that it was our fault.

This was Einstein's explanation for the phenomenon of entangled particles, which he termed "spooky action at a distance.")

Only his folks altered with the years, their hair going silver, Robert Sr., a high school football coach , ultimately on oxygen for emphysema, both of them seeming to shrink on the couch cushions in a way that made the crystal and porcelain artifacts look bigger each year.

And the feeling I had was not of wanting her so much as being surrounded by her, blundering inside her life without having moved.

In Naples, there were kids who were just lost. You knew they were never going to get back to what they'd been, or have a normal life. And then there were other ones who you though, maybe they will. What I'm saying is, we're the survivors. Not everyone is. But we are. Okay?

Hilarity keeps you busy for several blocks, but there's a sickness to it, like an itch that if you keep on scratching, will grind straight through skin and muscle and bone, shredding your heart.

Then tell them, faintly, 'I heard screaming'. Men with a history of violence live in fear of retribution.

hopscotch, jump rope, charm bracelets, buried treasure, Harriet the Spying, blood sisters, crank calls, pot, coke, quaaludes.

skin-that smooth plump sweetly fragrant sac upon which life scrawls the record of our failures and exhaustion

You call them friends, Hannah," Mom lashes out, confronting me from the doorway with hands on hips. "But your connection to them is situational. Years from now you'll look back and marvel at what you could have seen in most of these people.

And Danny got it: she was playing herself. A character: He liked these types because they pretty much told you what reactions they wanted you to have, and they liked Danny because he went ahead and had them.