Quotessence
Home / Authors / Jennifer Egan Biography
Jennifer Egan

Jennifer Egan Biography

Novelist

Related Quotes

“I would lie of course. I lied a lot and with good reason: to protect the truth—safeguard it like wearing fake gems to keep the real ones from getting stolen or cheapened by overuse. I guarded what truths I possessed because information was not a thing—it was colorless odorless shapeless and therefore indestructible. There was no way to retrieve or void it no way to halt its proliferation. Telling someone a secret was like storing plutonium inside a sandwich bag the information would inevitably outlive the friendship or love or trust in which you’d placed it. And then you would have given it away.”

Lies
Book:Look at Me
Create image

“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, or have a normal life. And then there were other ones who you thought, maybe they will." ... You opened your eyes, which you hadn't realized were shut again. "what I'm saying is, We're the survivors," Sasha said. ... "Not everyone is. But we are. Okay?”

LivingSurvivalCoping
Book:A Visit From the Goon Squad
Create image

“the presence of an old salt aboard the Elizabeth Seaman was profoundly reassuring. “Iron men in wooden boats,” they were called, as opposed to the wooden men in iron boats of today, like Kittredge, Farmingdale, and Eddie himself. Old salts partook of an origin myth, being close to the root of all things, including language. 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. Using these expressions in a practical way made him feel close to something fundamental—a deeper truth whose contours he believed he’d sensed, allegorically, even while still on land. Being at sea had brought Eddie nearer that truth. And the old salts were nearer still.”

FictionNovelBoatSailingSailboatBoatsBoatingSailboats
Author:Jennifer Egan
Create image

“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 Lou’s studio, pouring music down around us. A minute ago it was “Don’t Let Me Down”. Then it was Blondie’s “Heart of Glass”. Now it’s Iggy Pop’s “The Passenger”. Listening, I think, You will never know how much I understand you.”

MusicUnderstanding Oneself And Others
Author:Jennifer Egan
Create image

“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.”

MusicNostalgia
Book:A Visit From the Goon Squad
Create image

“He decided to take the C downtown and fumbled through blizzardy wind to Central Park West. Once there, he stepped inside the park. The wind dropped magically away. In the stillness, Gregory noticed that every twig and branch held a delicate stack of snow. Snow swarmed like honeybees in the golden glow of the old-fashioned streetlamps; it slathered tree trunks and sparkled like crushed diamonds at his feet. He heard a whispering noise and saw two people glide from among the trees on cross-country skis. A lavender lunar radiance filled the park. It was a world from childhood: castles and forests and magic lamps and princes scaling walls of brambles.”

ChildhoodSnowStillnessCentral ParkDiamondsHoneybees
Book:The Candy House
Create image

“Sie sehnte sich stattdessen nach dem Elan und der Zielstrebigkeit, die alle anderen Menschen in der Forty-second Street zu beflügeln schienen: Gruppen lachender Matrosen; Mädchen mit angelegten, eingesprühten Haaren; ältere Paare, die Damen im Pelz - alle eilten im Dämmerlicht dahin. Anna betrachtete sie forschend. Woher wussten sie, wohin es ging?”

MotivationHoffnungVertrauenZielWegGlaubenStrebenElanProzessAntrieblosigkeit
Book:Manhattan Beach: Roman
Create image

“I smoked my first pipe with Seth. I knew the stuff was bad, but I was so tired of being the cop, begging and ragging at him, throwing Pampers in his face when he walked in the door. I wanted to be on the same side again. So I smoked with Seth one afternoon when the girls were napping, and oh my God, I can only think about this for a minute or every part of me will turn into a mouth wanting more: the sexiness of it, fucking Seth like wild for the first time in months, going on even when the girls started to whimper and bang on the door. Then looking out the window and seeing the world shake itself to life: the heavy trees, the sky. And I was back on top. We were going to make it, Seth and I. The voice in my head was back again, telling me stories, too many to write down or even tell one from another.”

AddictionDrugsMeth
Book:The Keep
Create image

“Je zittriger und erschöpfter Davis von seinen Liegestützen wird, umso mehr vermischen sich die normalen Wörter, die wir alle jeden Tag benutzen, mit den Wörtern, die er zu einem früheren Zeitpunkt in seinem Leben benutzt haben muss [...] Und als mir Davis' alte Wörter erst einmal aufgefallen waren, fing ich an, sie überall zu hören, denn dieser Ort hier ist ein Wortgefängnis - Wörter bleiben hier stecken, sind gefangen von dem Moment an, an dem in unserem alten Leben die Uhr stehengeblieben ist [...] und ich schnappe mir diese Ausdrücke, ich fange sie in meinem Kopf und ich bewahre sie auf. Denn jedes davon hat die DNA eines ganzen Lebens in sich, eines Lebens, in das diese Worte gepasst und in dem sie einen Sinn ergeben haben, weil alle anderen sie ebenfalls benutzten. Ich sammle diese Wörter, und später, wenn ich das Notizbuch aufschlage, im dem ich dieses Tagebuch führe, [...] trage ich eins nach dem anderen ein. Und aus irgendeinem Grund versetzt mich das in gute Laune, wie Geld auf der Bank.”

SpracheWörter
Book:The Keep
Create image

“Anna war manchmal versucht, den Drink anzunehmen - und sei es nur, um die Reaktionen der beiden zu testen. Ihre Rolle, die so fest etabliert war, dass die Ursprünge längst im Dunkeln lagen, bestand darin, allen Versuchungen ihres Umfelds zu widerstehen - ein braves Mädchen zu sein, und das in jeder Hinsicht. Die Tatsache, dass sie schon seit ihrem vierzehnten Lebensjahr nicht mehr der Ausbund von Tugend war, für den man sie hielt, hätte sie in Anwesenheit von Tante und Mutter leicht vergessen können. Aber sie vergaß es nie ganz.”

IllusionAlkoholErziehungSündeMädchenBenehmenBravTugendhaftVersuchung
Book:Manhattan Beach: Roman
Create image

“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 he no longer had a drowning, helpless feeling when he glimpsed her beside him in bed: her ropy arms and soft, generous ass. Then he’d folded it in half again, so when he felt desire for Susan, it no longer brought with it an edgy terror of never being satisfied. Then in half again, so that feeling desire entailed no immediate need to act. Then in half again, so he hardly felt it. His desire was so small in the end that Ted could slip it inside his desk or a pocket and forget about it, and this gave him a feeling of safety and accomplishment, of having dismantled a perilous apparatus that might have crushed them both. Susan was baffled at first, then distraught; she’d hit him twice across the face; she’d run from the house in a thunderstorm and slept at a motel; she’d wrestled Ted to the bedroom floor in a pair of black crotchless underpants. But eventually a sort of amnesia had overtaken Susan; her rebellion and hurt had melted away, deliquesced into a sweet, eternal sunniness that was terrible in the way that life would be terrible, Ted supposed, without death to give it gravitas and shape. He’d presumed at first that her relentless cheer was mocking, another phase in her rebellion, until it came to him that Susan had forgotten how things were between them before Ted began to fold up his desire; she’d forgotten and was happy — had never not been happy — and while all of this bolstered his awe at the gymnastic adaptability of the human mind, it also made him feel that his wife had been brainwashed. By him.”

MarriageRelationshipDisappointment
Book:A Visit From the Goon Squad
Create image

“And it may be that a crowd at a particular moment of history creates the object to justify its gathering, as it did at the first Human Be-In and Monterey Pop and Woodstock. Or it may be that two generations of war and surveillance had left people craving the embodiment of their own unease in the form of a lone, unsteady man on a slide guitar.”

PeopleMenFirstsHumansMayTwoWarMomentsFormLeftGenerationsObjectsParticularGuitarCrowdsPopsJustifyGatheringCravingSlidesSurveillanceEmbodimentLoneWoodstockMonterey
Book:A Visit From the Goon Squad
Create image

“I write my first draft by hand, at least for fiction. For non-fiction, I write happily on a computer, but for fiction I write by hand, because I'm trying to achieve a kind of thoughtless state, or an unconscious instinctive state. I'm not reading what I write when I wrote. It's an unconscious outpouring that's a mess, and it's many, many steps away from anything anyone would want to read. Creating that way seems to generate the most interesting material for me to work with, though.”

WayWantWritingTryingFirstsKindStatesHandsSeemsReadingInterestingFictionStepsAchieveMaterialsComputerCreatingMessUnconsciousMost InterestingNon Fiction
Author:Jennifer Egan
Create image

“The average person might articulate them differently, but we all think about interpersonal relationships in one way or another. Writers just express that in different ways and capture it in different ways. To some degree, we're all thinking about the same things. It's the zeitgeist. The trick, in a way, as a writer, is to hope that your interests in some sense link up with the culture around you.”

ThinkingWayPersonsDifferentMightCultureInterestDegreesAverageTricksOne WayDifferent WaysLinksCaptureAverage PersonZeitgeistInterpersonalInterpersonal Relationship
Author:Jennifer Egan
Create image

“Music and time have such an interesting relationship. Music makes time fall away like almost nothing else. You hear a song from another moment of your life and it really is like you're still there. That's why the music of our youth ends up being particularly powerful. The coming of age music that you grab a hold of as the symbol or the expression of your independence and hopes for the future and anger and rebellion or whatever it is you're feeling is so powerful for the rest of your life when you hear it.”

StillsEndsMomentsFeelingsAgeSongFallInterestingPowerfulYouthExpressionLike YouIndependenceSymbolsRebellionComing Of AgeRest Of Your LifeMaking TimeHope For The Future
Author:Jennifer Egan
Create image

“I'm very interested in the way the Internet has changed teenage life. Obviously it's very different from when I grew up, when there weren't even answering machines, much less computers. I was telling my children this the other day, and the little one said, "Did you have electricity, Mom?" and I was like okay, enough, kid.”

WayChildrenLittlesSaidDifferentEnoughKidsChangedGrewMomInternetComputerGrew UpOkayMachinesMy ChildrenElectricityTeenageAnswering MachinesTeenage Life
Author:Jennifer Egan
Create image

“I write fiction longhand. That's not so much about rejecting technology as being unable to write fiction on a computer for some reason. I don't think I would write it on a typewriter either. I write in a very blind gut instinctive way. It just doesn't feel right. There's a physical connection. And then in nonfiction that's not the case at all. I can't even imagine writing nonfiction by hand.”

ThinkingWayFeelsWritingI CanReasonHandsFictionCasesTechnologyImagineComputerConnectionsBlindGutsNonfictionTypewritersFeels RightRejectingWriting Nonfiction
Author:Jennifer Egan
Create image

“I don't think that all girls seek the influence of older men, but I think girls whose fathers are absent or recessed from their lives often do. And honestly, when I was growing up, fathers were generally pretty absent from their children's lives. We didn't see a lot of them. That may be something that has genuinely changed for the better in our culture: men are more present for their children now that more women are working.”

ThinkingMenChildrenCultureGirlFatherGrowing UpInfluenceChangedHonestly
Author:Jennifer Egan
Create image