Top 140 Jennifer Egan Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “He was of no more consequence than an empty cigarette packet.”

— Jennifer Egan

102. “This vision tumbled over Phoebe with the force of revelation: she would stand somewhere and look back, she would live a life.”

— Jennifer Egan

103. “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?”

— Jennifer Egan

104. “Even the financial disclosure statements that political bloggers were required to post hadn’t stemmed the suspicion that people’s opinions weren’t really their own. “Who’s paying you?” was a retort that might follow any bout of enthusiasm, along with laughter – who would let themselves be bought?”

— Jennifer Egan

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

— Jennifer Egan

106. “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.”

— Jennifer Egan

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

— Jennifer Egan

108. “One area I have a huge amount of trouble in is writing about myself. I get a heavy, almost depressed feeling.”

— Jennifer Egan

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

— Jennifer Egan

110. “I know I’m famous and irresitible – a combination whose properties closely resemble radioactivity – and I know that you in this room are helpless against me.”

— Jennifer Egan

111. “He’d take danger over sorrow every time.”

— Jennifer Egan

112. “Problems he couldn’t solve made him angry.”

— Jennifer Egan

113. “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.”

— Jennifer Egan

114. “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.”

— Jennifer Egan

115. “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.”

— Jennifer Egan

116. “What he needed was to find fifty more people like him, who had stopped being themselves without realizing it.”

— Jennifer Egan

117. “I felt no shame 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.”

— Jennifer Egan

118. “The need for personal glory is like cigarette addiction: a habit that feels life-sustaining even as it kills you.”

— Jennifer Egan

119. “All that love, all that pain, all the stuff people feel – not just me and you, brother, but everyone, everyone who’s ever walked this beautiful green planet – how can all that disappear when somebody dies? It can’t disappear, it’s too big. Too strong, too... permanent. So it moves to another frequency, where the human ear can’t pick up.”

— Jennifer Egan

120. “All her excitement had seeped away, leaving behind a terrible sadness, an emptiness that felt violent, as if she’d been gouged.”

— Jennifer Egan

121. “Nothing is free! Only children expect otherwise even as myths and fairy tales warn us: Rumpelstiltskin, King Midas, Handsel and Gretel. Never trust a candy house! It was only a matter of time before someone made them pay for what they thought they were getting for free.”

— Jennifer Egan

122. “I understood with sudden clarity that doing the right thing – being right – gets you nothing in this world. It’s the sinners everyone loves: the flailers, the scramblers, the bumblers. There was nothing sexy about getting it right the first time.”

— Jennifer Egan

123. “Poets claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years.”

— Jennifer Egan

124. “Lizzie and her friends barely knew what the Internet was in 1992, but Bix could feel the vibrations of an invisible web of connection forcing its way through the familiar world like cracks riddling a windshield. Life as they knew it would soon shatter and be swept away, at which point everyone would rise together into a new metaphysical sphere.”

— Jennifer Egan

125. “A smile is a door that is both open and closed.”

— Jennifer Egan

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

— Jennifer Egan

127. “I see now that the place I’ve been yearning for is my own imagination.”

— Jennifer Egan

128. “But knowing everything is too much like knowing nothing; without a story, it’s all just information.”

— Jennifer Egan

129. “To hell with God,” Fern said. “I’m worried about the Internet.” “By which you mean an all-seeing, all-knowing entity that may be predicting and controlling your behavior, even when you think you’re choosing for yourself?”

— Jennifer Egan

130. “Nowadays, a man ill at ease in his surroundings will pull out his phone, request the Wi-Fi password, and rejoin a virtual sphere where his identity is instantly reaffirmed. Let us all take a moment to consider deeply what isolation was customary before these times arrived!”

— Jennifer Egan

131. “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.”

— Jennifer Egan

132. “Already midcareer, Ted published Van Gogh, Painter of Sound, which found correlations between Van Gogh’s types of brushstroke and the proximity of noisemaking creatures like cicadas, bees, crickets, and woodpeckers – whose microscopic traces had been detected in the paint itself.”

— Jennifer Egan

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

— Jennifer Egan

134. “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.”

— Jennifer Egan

135. “Making her mark ended up not involving any of the things she’d banked on – her dancing, her beauty, her sexual confidence – in fact, all of those succumbed to it. Heroin is her great love, her life’s work, and she has given up everything for it, through renunciation or sheer neglect.”

— Jennifer Egan

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

— Jennifer Egan

137. “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.”

— Jennifer Egan

138. “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.”

— Jennifer Egan

139. “Alone by choice on Saturday nights, writing by an open window in his studio apartment, Gregory had experienced a kind of euphoria: a swelling, bursting, yearning hunger that had something in common with lust but included everyone, from the revelers outside his window to the carousers down the hall. He was where he wanted to be, and needed nothing else.”

— Jennifer Egan

140. “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.”

— Jennifer Egan

141. “Social media was dead, everyone agreed; self-representations were inherently narcissistic or propagandic or both, and grossly inauthentic.”

— Jennifer Egan

142. “He felt the mystery of his own unconscious like a whale looming invisibly beneath a tiny swimmer. If he couldn’t search or retrieve or view his own past, then it wasn’t really his. It was lost.”

— Jennifer Egan

143. “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.”

— Jennifer Egan

144. “Mysteries that are destroyed by measurement were never truly mysterious; only our ignorance made them seem so.”

— Jennifer Egan

145. “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.”

— Jennifer Egan