Quotes by Jennifer Egan

“I picture it like Judgement Day,' he says finally, his eyes on the water. 'We'll rise up out of our bodies and find each other again in spirit form. We'll meet in that new place, all of us together...”

“Vinegar: that's what fear smells like.”

“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.”

“Yet each disappointment Ted felt in his wife, each incremental deflation, was accompanied by a seizure of guilt; many years ago, he had taken the passion he felt for Susan and folded it in half, so...”

“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?”

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

“The pause makes you think the song will end. And then the song isn't really over, so you're relieved. But then the song does actually end, because every song ends, obviously, and THAT. TIME. THE. E...”

“She was clean": no piercings, tattoos, or scarifications. All the kids were now. And who could blame them, Alex thought, after watching three generations of flaccid tattoos droop like moth-eaten up...”

“This is the music business. 'Five years is five hundred years' - your words.”

“And then I notice the music flooding out of every part of the apartment at once the couch, the walls, even the floor and I know Bennies alone in Lous studio, pouring music down around us. A minut...”

“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 e...”

“When the clock stops on a life, all things emanating from it become precious, finite, and cordoned off for preservation. Each aspect of the dead person is removed from the flux of the everyday, whi...”

“That's what death is, Danny thought: wanting to talk to someone and not being able to.”

“So this is it what cost me all that time. A man who turned out to be old, a house that turned out to be empty.”

“Sasha's green eyes were right up against yours, the lashes interlocking. "In Naples," she said, "there were kids who were just lost. You knew they were never going to get back to what they'd been, ...”

“Sure, everything is ending," Jules said, "but not yet.”

“Das mine!' protested Ava, Bennie's daughter, affirming Alex's recent theory that language acquisition involved a phase of speaking German. She snatched a plastic skillet away from his own daughter,...”

“Too Clear, too clean. The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was "digitization" which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh. Film, photography,...”

“Like all failed experiments, that one taught me something I didnt expect: one key ingredient of so-called experience is the delusional faith that it is unique and special, that those included in it...”

“Times a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around? Scotty shook his head. The goon won.”