Jennifer Egan > Quotes

“I'm always happy," Sasha said. "Sometimes I just forget.”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“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, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“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. END. IS. FOR. REAL.”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“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, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“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, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“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, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“Sure, everything is ending," Jules said, "but not yet.”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“Time’s a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?” Scotty shook his head. “The goon won.”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“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, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“I’m done. I’m old, I’m sad - that’s on a good day. I want out of this mess. But 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, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“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, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“I think, The world is actually huge. That's the part no one can really explain.”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“Everybody sounds stoned, because they're e-mailing people the whole time they're talking to you.”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“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 upholstery over poorly stuffed biceps and saggy asses?”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“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.”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“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, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“Redemption, transformation--God how she wanted these things. Every day, every minute. Didn't everyone?”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“Rich children are always blond, Jocelyn goes. It has to do with vitamins.”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“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, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“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, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“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, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“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, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“th blu nyt
th stRs u can't c
th hum tht nevr gOs awy”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“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, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“See," Sasha muttered, eyeing the sun. "It's mine.”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“That we have some history together that hasn’t happened yet.”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“When does a fake Mohawk become a real Mohawk? Who decides? How do you know if it's happened?”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“Everyone we've lost, we'll find. Or they'll find us.”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“You kneel beside her, breathing the familiar smell of Sasha's sleep, whispering into her ear some mix of I'm sorry and I will never leave you, I'll be curled around your heart for the rest of your life, until the water pressing my shoulders and chest crushes me awake and I hear Sasha screaming into my face: Fight! Fight! Fight!”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“This is the music business. 'Five years is five hundred years' - your words.”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“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. And I, like a scientist unwittingly inhaling toxic fumes from the beaker I was boiling in my lab, had, through sheer physical proximity, been infected by that same delusion and in my drugged state had come to believe I was Excluded: condemned to stand shivering outside the public library at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street forever and...”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“They resumed walking. Alex felt an ache in his eyes and throat. "I don't know what happened to me," he said, shaking his head. "I honestly don't."

Bennie glanced at him, a middle-aged man with chaotic silver hair and thoughtful eyes. "You grew up, Alex," he said, "just like the rest of us.”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“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, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“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, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“and the question is, which one is really “you,”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“Things had gotten -- what's the word? Dry. Things had gotten sort of dry for me. I was working as a city janitor in a neighborhood elementary school and, in summers, collecting litter in the park alongside the East River near the WIlliamsburg Bridge. I felt no shame whatsoever 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, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“What he needed was to find fifty more people like him, who had stopped being themselves without realizing it.”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“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, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“happened as I listened: I felt pain. Not in my head, not in my arm, not in my leg; everywhere at once. I told myself there was no difference between being “inside” and being “outside,” that it all came down to X’s and O’s that could be acquired in any number of different ways, but the pain increased to a point where I thought I might collapse, and I limped away.”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“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, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“Sometimes I imagine myself looking back on right now and I think like where will I be standing when I look back Will right now look like the beginning of a great life or... or what”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“Too clear, too clean. The problem was precision, perfection;”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“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, and first it'll seem strange, and pretty soon it'll seem strange that you could ever lose someone, or get lost.”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“Kissing Mother Superior, incompetent, hairball, poppy seeds, on the can.”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“A bit of theory as we settle down for lunch: the waiter's treatment of Kitty is actually a kind of sandwich, with the bottom bread being the bored and slightly effete way he normally acts with customers, the middle being the crazed and abnormal way he feels around this famous nineteen-year-old girl, and the top bread being his attempt to contain and conceal this alien middle layer with some mode of behavior that at least approximates the bottom layer of boredom and effeteness that is his norm.”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“I understood that expensive shirts looked better than cheap shirts. The fabric wasn't shiny, no - shiny would be cheap. But it glowed, like there was light coming through from the inside. It was a fucking beautiful shirt, is what I'm saying”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“But it was another girl, young and new to the city, fiddling with her keys.”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“if thr r childrn thr mst be a fUtr rt?”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“The site of his thinking and writing was a small office wedged in one corner of his shaggy house, on whose door he’d installed a lock to keep his sons out. They gathered wistfully outside it, his boys, with their chipped, heartbreaking faces. They were not permitted to so much as knock upon the door to the room in which he thought and wrote about art, but Ted hadn’t found a way to keep them from prowling outside it, ghostly feral creatures drinking from a pond in moonlight, their bare feet digging at the carpet, their fingers sweating on the walls, leaving spoors of grease that Ted would point out each week to Elsa, the cleaning woman. He would sit in his office, listening to the movements of his boys, imagining that he felt their hot, curious breath. I will not let them in, he would tell himself. I will sit and think about art. But he found, to his despair, that often he couldn’t think about art. He thought about nothing at all.”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“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, A Visit from the Goon Squad