Top 140 Jennifer Egan Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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.”

— Jennifer Egan

2. “There’s a fine line between thinking about somebody and thinking about not thinking about somebody, but I have the patience and the self-control to walk that line for hours – days, if I have to.”

— Jennifer Egan

3. “I don’t want to fade away, I want to flame away – I want my death to be an attraction, a spectacle, a mystery. A work of art.”

— Jennifer Egan

4. “Read at the level at which you want to write. Reading is the nourishment that feeds the kind of writing you want to do.”

— Jennifer Egan

Featured in: Reading Quotes

5. “There are so many ways to go wrong. All we’ve got are metaphors, and they’re never exactly right. You can never just Say. The. Thing.”

— Jennifer Egan

6. “It’s finished. Everything went past, without me.”

— Jennifer Egan

7. “You can do it alone. But it’s going to be so much harder.”

— Jennifer Egan

8. “I listened to classic rock and roll, and punk rock. ‘Goon Squad’ provides a pretty accurate playlist of my teenage years, though it leaves out ‘The Who,’ which was my absolute favorite band.”

— Jennifer Egan

9. “That we have some history together that hasn’t happened yet.”

— Jennifer Egan

10. “No one is waiting for me. In this story, I’m the girl no one is waiting for.”

— Jennifer Egan

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

11. “Redemption, transformation – God how she wanted these things. Every day, every minute. Didn’t everyone?”

— Jennifer Egan

12. “Time’s a goon right? Isn’t that the expression?”

— Jennifer Egan

13. “The sky was electric blue above the trees but the yard felt dark. Stephanie went to the edge of the lawn and sat her forehead on her knees. The grass and soil were still warm from the day. She wanted to cry but she couldn’t. The feeling was too deep.”

— Jennifer Egan

14. “If I had a view like this to look down on every day, I would have the energy and inspiration to conquer the world. The trouble is, when you most need such a view, no one gives it to you.”

— Jennifer Egan

15. “I can’t tell if she’s actually real, or if she’s stopped caring if she’s real or not. Or is not caring what makes a person real?”

— Jennifer Egan

16. “Men said “Girls are weak” when in fact girls made them weak.”

— Jennifer Egan

17. “It’s turning out to be a bad day, a day when the sun feels like teeth.”

— Jennifer Egan

18. “I am at my worst trying to write about things that overlap with my life.”

— Jennifer Egan

19. “I’m a dogged person. I respond to adversity with a steely resistance.”

— Jennifer Egan

20. “I was a stepchild in two different families. The hardest thing about being a stepchild is you know that in some way everything would be easier if you didnt exist.”

— Jennifer Egan

21. “The world is full of shitheads, Rhea. Don’t listen to them – listen to me. And I know that Lou is one of those shitheads. But I listen.”

— Jennifer Egan

22. “I think, The world is actually huge. That’s the part no one can really explain.”

— Jennifer Egan

23. “A dog’s love is forever. We expect infidelity from one another; we marvel at this one’s ability to hold that one’s interest for fifty, sixty years; perhaps some of us feel a secret contempt for monogamy even as we extol it, wishing parole for its weary participants. But dogs do not receive our sympathy or our suspicion – from dogs we presume an eternal adoration.”

— Jennifer Egan

24. “Structural dissatisfaction: Returning to circumstances that once pleased you, after having experienced a more thrilling or opulent way of life, and finding that you can no longer tolerate them.”

— Jennifer Egan

25. “Too clear, too clean. The problem was precision, perfection;.”

— Jennifer Egan

26. “I guess in my own life, privacy, anonymity, and the mystery of being lost are important. I also feel that people are mysterious and complex no matter what they do, and no matter how hard they try to reveal their own mystery.”

— Jennifer Egan

27. “Technology makes everyone feel old. A laptop is old after two years. Someone always has something newer. Everyone seems to feel obsolete now, even the young.”

— Jennifer Egan

28. “Everyone we’ve lost, we’ll find. Or they’ll find us.”

— Jennifer Egan

29. “Rich children are always blond, Jocelyn goes. It has to do with vitamins.”

— Jennifer Egan

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

— Jennifer Egan

31. “Her only thought was of getting away, as if she were carrying a live grenade from inside the house, so that when it exploded, it would destroy just herself.”

— Jennifer Egan

32. “I felt more doubtful than usual with ‘Goon Squad,’ because I knew that the book’s genre wasn’t easily named – Novel? Stories? Novel-in-stories? – and I worried that its lack of a clear category would count against it. My hopes for it were pretty modest.”

— Jennifer Egan

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

— Jennifer Egan

34. “We live in a moment and a culture when reading is really endangered. There’s simply no way to write well, though, if you’re not reading well.”

— Jennifer Egan

Featured in: Reading Quotes

35. “Americans are less selfish than some of our politicians believe and will respond with reason and resilience to passionate clarity.”

— Jennifer Egan

36. “When does a fake Mohawk become a real Mohawk? Who decides? How do you know if it’s happened?”

— Jennifer Egan

37. “This is the music business. ‘Five years is five hundred years’ – your words.”

— Jennifer Egan

38. “That adage about ‘Write what you know’ is basically the opposite of the way I function. I write about what I’m curious to find out.”

— Jennifer Egan

39. “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.”

— Jennifer Egan

40. “I’ve never been that confident. I don’t tend to think, swaggeringly, I’m going to ace this. It’s just not who I am.”

— Jennifer Egan

41. “Rebecca was an academic star. Her new book was on the phenomenon of word casings, a term she’d invented for words that no longer had meaning outside quotation marks. English was full of these empty words – “friend” and “real” and “story” and “change” – words that had been shucked of their meanings and reduced to husks. Some, like “identity” and “search” and “cloud,” had clearly been drained of life by their Web usage. With others, the reasons were more complex; how had “American” become an ironic term? How had “democracy” come to be used in an arch, mocking way?”

— Jennifer Egan

42. “Kissing Mother Superior, incompetent, hairball, poppy seeds, on the can.”

— Jennifer Egan

43. “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.”

— Jennifer Egan

44. “I like to be near water whenever possible, don’t you?” he said, gazing into the dark. “Melville put it best: ‘Nothing will content men but the extremest limit of the land’ – but that’s not it, I can’t recall the quote. It’s in our nature to seek out the edge. Even on a golf course.”

— Jennifer Egan

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

— Jennifer Egan

46. “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.”

— Jennifer Egan

47. “What moved Ted, mashed some delicate glassware in his chest, was the quiet of their interaction, the absence of drama or tears as they gazed at each other, touching gently.”

— Jennifer Egan

48. “But it was another girl, young and new to the city, fiddling with her keys.”

— Jennifer Egan

49. “Now that Scotty has entered the realm of myth, everyone wants to own him. And maybe they should. Doesn’t a myth belong to everyone?”

— Jennifer Egan

50. “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.”

— Jennifer Egan