efil.

“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

“Vinegar: that's what fear smells like.”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“And Alex understood that Scotty Hausmann did not exist. He was a word casing in human form: a shell whose essence has vanished.”
― 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