Top 140 Jennifer Egan Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “It was the hat. He looked sweet in the hat. How could a man in a fuzzy blue hat have used human bones to pave his roads?”

— Jennifer Egan

52. “We’re the survivors. Not everyone is. But we are.”

— Jennifer Egan

53. “Like all failed experiments, that one taught me something I didn’t expect: one key ingredient of so-called experience is the delusional faith that it is unique and special, that those included in it are privileged and those excluded from it are missing out.”

— Jennifer Egan

54. “The bottom line is that I like my first drafts to be blind, unconscious, messy efforts; that’s what gets me the best material.”

— Jennifer Egan

55. “Oh we’ll know each other forever, Bix says. The days of losing touch are almost gone.”

— Jennifer Egan

56. “The answers were maddeningly absent – it was like trying to remember a song that you knew made you feel a certain way, without a title, artist, or even a few bars to bring it back.”

— Jennifer Egan

57. “He’s rigged a tiny cassette player with a small set of foam earphones to listen to demo tapes and rough mixes. Occasionally he’ll hand the device to Mindy, wanting her opinion, and each time, the experience of music pouring directly against her eardrums – hers alone – is a shock that makes her eyes well up; the privacy of it, the way it transforms her surroundings into a golden montage, as if she were looking back on this lark in Africa with Lou from some distant future.”

— Jennifer Egan

58. “Everybody sounds stoned, because they’re e-mailing people the whole time they’re talking to you.”

— Jennifer Egan

59. “I hope to keep writing journalism as long as I write fiction; it’s afforded me such amazing adventures and opportunities. It does take a lot of time, so it’s hard to do both at once, but I try to do a big journalism piece every couple of years, and I’ll hopefully continue with that.”

— Jennifer Egan

60. “We stand there, quiet. My questions all seem wrong: How did you get so old? Was it all at once, in a day, or did you peter out bit by bit? When did you stop having parties? Did everyone else get old too, or was it just you? Are other people still here, hiding in the palm trees or holding their breath underwater? When did you last swim your laps? Do your bones hurt? Did you know this was coming and hide that you knew, or did it ambush you from behind?”

— Jennifer Egan

61. “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.”

— Jennifer Egan

62. “The music industry is an interesting lens through which to look at change, because it has had such a difficult time adjusting to the digital age.”

— Jennifer Egan

63. “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.”

— Jennifer Egan

64. “Kathy was a Republican, one of those people who used the unforgivable phrase “meant to be” – usually when describing her own good fortune or the disasters that had befallen other people.”

— Jennifer Egan

65. “She’d risked everything, and here was the result: the raw, warped core of her life.”

— Jennifer Egan

66. “She looks like someone I want to know, or maybe even be.”

— Jennifer Egan

67. “We work in the realm of the impression.”

— Jennifer Egan

68. “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.”

— Jennifer Egan

69. “Their insularity made him envious – not just of the men but all three of them. They were working together, two men and a girl, with evident ease. Even after the diving suit was on and she no longer looked like a girl, he was resentful of their shared knowledge, their nomenclature and expertise.”

— Jennifer Egan

70. “A sense of that kind of narrative movement that we experience online could have been in my mind easily, though not consciously. I do rely so much on my unconscious, the way I write my stuff the way I do. I let my unconscious work. I have better ideas that way and more interesting work.”

— Jennifer Egan

71. “I don’t really know where my ideas come from. I start with a time and a place. That’s what I need to get started, and an intellectual question.”

— Jennifer Egan

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

— Jennifer Egan

73. “A frenzy of activity that had mostly led him in circles: wasn’t that a fairly accurate description of lust?”

— Jennifer Egan

74. “Vinegar: that’s what fear smells like.”

— Jennifer Egan

75. “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.”

— Jennifer Egan

76. “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.”

— Jennifer Egan

77. “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.”

— Jennifer Egan

78. “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.”

— Jennifer Egan

79. “They sat in silence. Feathers, Phoebe thought, searching in vain for some moment of her own that could rival the beauty and mystery of Faith’s act. She felt a disappointment so familiar it was almost a comfort.”

— Jennifer Egan

80. “I think the one thing that’s changed over time is that I’ve come to realise, as a fiction writer, the fact that I don’t think it will work out, doesn’t mean that it actually won’t.”

— Jennifer Egan

81. “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.”

— Jennifer Egan

82. “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.”

— Jennifer Egan

83. “Hindsight creates the illusion that your life has led you inevitably to the present moment.”

— Jennifer Egan

84. “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.”

— Jennifer Egan

85. “He liked the thought that his own power would one day be refined into translucence, with no memory of the blood and earth that had generated it.”

— Jennifer Egan

86. “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.”

— Jennifer Egan

87. “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.”

— Jennifer Egan

88. “Maintaining an appearance mattered as much – more – than what was underneath. The deeper things could come and go, but what broke the surface would be lodged in everyone’s memory.”

— Jennifer Egan

89. “I think, for one thing, all of us remember those teenage years and those songs that we fell in love with and the music scene that we were part of. So, in a certain way, music cuts through time like almost nothing else. You know, it makes us feel like we’re back in an earlier moment.”

— Jennifer Egan

90. “If you don’t have people that the reader cares about and stories that are gripping, you’ve got nothing.”

— Jennifer Egan

91. “There’s something very strange about associating me with that prize. I had hoped for it in a more directed way as a journalist. Somehow as a journalist you know there are Pulitzers out there and you can work hard and get one. To win it for Fiction seems unbelievable.”

— Jennifer Egan

92. “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.”

— Jennifer Egan

93. “How do you know a gangster?” “Usually, the room goes a little quiet when he walks in.”

— Jennifer Egan

94. “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.”

— Jennifer Egan

95. “I haven’t had writer’s block. I think it’s because my process involves writing very badly.”

— Jennifer Egan

96. “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.”

— Jennifer Egan

97. “I had this idea that I could hire myself out as a person to go on archeological digs and dig, without any training! I actually wrote to a number of archeology departments and offered up my services.”

— Jennifer Egan

98. “Each time Anna moved from her father’s world to her mother and Lydia’s, she felt as if she’d shaken free of one life for a deeper one. And when she returned to her father, holding his hand as they ventured out into the city, it was her mother and Lydia she shook off, often forgetting them completely. Back and forth she went, deeper – deeper still – until it seemed there was no place further down she could go. But somehow there always was. She had never reached the bottom.”

— Jennifer Egan

99. “Because you can’t write habitually and well all the time, you have to be willing to write badly. That’s how you get the regularity that enables you to be present for the good stuff.”

— Jennifer Egan

100. “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.”

— Jennifer Egan