Look at Me Quotes

“At night, the house thick with sleep, she would peer out her bedroom window at the trees and sky and feel the presence of a mystery. Some possibility that included her--separate from her present life and without its limitations. A secret. Riding in the car with her father, she would look out at other cars full of people she'd never seen, any one of whom she might someday meet and love, and would feel the world holding her making its secret plans.”
― Jennifer Egan, Look at Me

“We lie. That's what we do. You're selling me a line of bullshit and you want me to sell you a line of bullshit back so you can write a major line of bullshit and be paid for it.”
― Jennifer Egan, Look at Me

“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.”
― Jennifer Egan, Look at Me

“As for myself, I’d rather not say very much. When I breathe, the air feels good in my chest. And when I think of the mirrored room, as of course I still do, I understand now that it’s empty, filled with chimeras like Charlotte Swenson—the hard, beautiful seashells left behind long after the living creatures within have struggled free and swum away. Or died. Life can’t be sustained under the pressure of so many eyes. Even as we try to reveal the mystery of ourselves, to catch it unawares, expose its pulse and flinch and peristalsis, the truth has slipped away, burrowed further inside a dark, coiled privacy that replenishes itself like blood. It cannot be seen, much as one might wish to show it. It dies the instant it is touched by light.”
― Jennifer Egan, Look at Me

“Like the apple bruising Kafka’s beetle, each of these pellets of recollection lodged in Moose’s flesh, releasing its cargo of memories of all the things he had lost— “Not lost! Gained!” Moose thundered aloud, but now, mercifully, that debate (lost or gained?) was supplanted in his mind by the proximity of Belmont Harbor and the yacht club. Yes, this was the place; Moose eased the station wagon into a parking space, desperate to free himself of its chassis, whose sole purpose, it now seemed, was to hold him still so that these bullets of memory could assault him, enter his flesh and release their shrapnel of foolish and unreliable nostalgia.”
― Jennifer Egan, Look at Me

“I was peeling apart in layers. I was breaking into bits. She was coming apart at the seams … my head buzzing with a confusion of junk noise, white noise, space junk, a junkyard of noisy thought that made me long instead for a lovely, petaled silence.”
― Jennifer Egan, Look at Me

“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, Look at Me

“He doesn’t know who he’s making love to, I would think, and panic would slash through me until I reminded myself that it was over now, a freakish aberration not to be repeated. It was Hansen who first made me aware of shadow selves. He would lie in bed watching me for whole minutes, and I would look back into his eyes and wonder, What does he see? How can he not see the truth? Where is it hidden? It made me ask, when I looked at other people, what possible selves they were hiding behind the strange rubber masks of their faces. I could nearly always find one, if I watched for long enough. It became the only one I was interested in seeing.”
― Jennifer Egan, Look at Me

“I sensed immediately that he'd once been overweight. He moved with a fat person's tiptoey apology.”
― Jennifer Egan, Look at Me

“As for myself, I'd rather not say very much. When I breathe, the air feels good in my chest. And when I think of the mirrored room, as of course I still do, I understand now that it's empty, filled with chimeras like Charlotte Swenson--the hard, beautiful seashells left behind long after the living creatures within have struggled free and swum away. Or died. Life can't be sustained under the pressure of so many eyes. Even as we try to reveal the mystery of ourselves, to catch it unawares, expose its pulse and flinch and peristalsis, the truth has slipped away, burrowed further inside a dark, coiled privacy that replenishes itself like blood. It cannot be seen, much as one might wish to show it. It dies the instant it is touched by light.”
― Jennifer Egan, Look at Me

“And Moose heard her happiness then—Oh, the joy that came of dispensing happiness to others, of entering happiness’s interlocking circuitry! Yet even now Moose felt the persistence of whatever worry he’d heard in Ellen’s voice before the happiness his remark had occasioned, and no sooner was the phone back in its cradle than he was felled by a crash of despair on his sister’s behalf. We’re all alone, he thought, crumpling back onto the fragment of living room couch that wasn’t draped in maps of Rockford. We are all alone.”
― Jennifer Egan, Look at Me

“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, Look at Me

“By then I’d been watching shadow selves for many years. They’d rescued me from boredom, from sadness. From tables full of rich, awful people. They’d given depth to the shallow, dimensions to the simpleminded. Mystery to the blatant. They were my own secret project. But Z knew about them, too. He was looking for mine. A spy. Like me.”
― Jennifer Egan, Look at Me

“And it was only as he rose from the bed, his body illuminated by the colored lights of the city, that I caught the glint of calculation behind his eyes, a cold, blank set to his face. His shadow self, and not a nice one.”
― Jennifer Egan, Look at Me

“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, Look at Me

“But a story was invisible, infinite, it had no size or shape. Information. It could fill the world or fit inside a fingernail.”
― Jennifer Egan, Look at Me

“She can learn the things that matter by studying almost anything,”
― Jennifer Egan, Look at Me

“because at that point, the point at which my acceleration began to reverse, time started running together—there was no more arc of ascension by which to measure it.”
― Jennifer Egan, Look at Me

“Ellen and I were neutralized by our disunion to the same degree that we'd been empowered by our accord.”
― Jennifer Egan, Look at Me

“The old pictures were no help; like all good pictures, they hid the truth.”
― Jennifer Egan, Look at Me

“Eyeing this tableau, I had a sudden epiphany—I understood why Thomas had come to Rockford: for all his fund-raising abilities and management abilities and entrepreneurial genius, his dexterity as a salesman of ideas and gift for answering the collective prayers of the Zeitgeist, Thomas Keene wanted something else entirely from his life. He wanted to be a director.”
― Jennifer Egan, Look at Me

“I rang the bell. When it was clear that no one was home, I opened the door and went in.”
― Jennifer Egan, Look at Me

“With Irene's help, I could perform the tasks of an Extraordinary Person. She could read and write, for one thing. And I trusted her.”
― Jennifer Egan, Look at Me

“... if we can work the story around the idea of punishment and redemption, that could be *very* appealing.”
― Jennifer Egan, Look at Me

“After eight years in the same one-bedroom apartment, I was suddenly finding it crowded beyond capacity. There was me. There was my unrecognizable face. And there was someone else. It was neither a child nor an animal. It was Despair.”
― Jennifer Egan, Look at Me

“Doesn't having been a model make you a little . . . visible?'
'Not at all,' I said. 'Exactly the opposite. People who've known me for years stare at me like they've never seen me before.' The smile was hurting my face.”
― Jennifer Egan, Look at Me

“I noticed one with short, raven-colored hair who looked not unlike myself (we are interchangeable--the first lesson one learns as a professional beauty).”
― Jennifer Egan, Look at Me

“Trivial, yes. But I was aiming for the mirrored room. There was nothing more essential in the world; nothing that failed, when placed beside it, to disappear completely.”
― Jennifer Egan, Look at Me

“He had not been specific, and she was too polite, too respectful to ask what exactly it was that had caused him to abandon one life and begin another... Michael West had done it more than once. There was a freshness in leaving behind one life for the next, a raw, tingling sensation that was one step short of pain. An imperative of the mind and spirit had reshaped the facts of his life like tides rearranging a shore. And in each new life there was Abby, awaiting his arrival--more than one Abby, sometimes--people with empty places beside them where Michael could stand look as if he belonged.”
― Jennifer Egan, Look at Me

“As children, Grace and I liked to pretend our life was a movie projected onto a giant screen before an audience who watched, rapt, as we ate our pork chops and finished our homework and went to sleep side by side in our twin beds, Grace rising to shut the closet door if I left it open. Gradually, mysteriously, that fantasy evolved into a vocation--I came to imagine my future not in terms of anything I might do or accomplish, but the notoriety that would follow.”
― Jennifer Egan, Look at Me