Emerald City Quotes

“I guess it’s always romantic when two people fall in love.... Even if it turns out not to be real.”
― Jennifer Egan, Emerald City

“There are things you're just positive will happen to you. Then there's that second when you realize, Jesus Christ. Maybe they won't.”
― Jennifer Egan, Emerald City

“... see how everything now is precious, how someday I'll know I was lucky to be here.”
― Jennifer Egan, Emerald City

“The girls looked aghast. I watched them cast baleful looks their mother’s way, and saw, in their silky, seamless faces, the thick patina so many years of privilege had left behind. Suddenly I was enraged—enraged at both of them for not knowing what these privileges had cost.”
― Jennifer Egan, Emerald City

“It wasn’t depression, exactly; more a weird, restless pressure that made me wander the house late at night, opening the best bottles of wine in our cellar and drinking them alone while I channel-surfed along the forgotten byways of cable TV.”
― Jennifer Egan, Emerald City

“lousy food and not enough of it.”
― Jennifer Egan, Emerald City

“San Francisco is ours, we’ve signed our name on it a hundred times: SISTERS OF THE MOON.”
― Jennifer Egan, Emerald City

“I feel Angel warm beside me and think how I’ll never love anyone this much, how without her I would disappear.”
― Jennifer Egan, Emerald City

“This is it," I sob, clinging to Angel and Liz, their warm shoulders. I hear them crying, too, and think, It will be like this always. From now on, nothing can divide us.”
― Jennifer Egan, Emerald City

“When I’m thirty-four, tonight will be a million years ago, I think–the St. Francis Hotel and the rainy palm tree sounds, Silas with the bandage on his head–and this makes me see how everything now is precious, how someday I’ll know I was lucky to be here.”
― Jennifer Egan, Emerald City

“San Francisco is ours, we’ve signed our name on it a hundred times: SISTERS OF
THE MOON.”
― Jennifer Egan, Emerald City

“And it struck him that this was New York: a place that glittered from a distance even when you reached it.”
― Jennifer Egan, Emerald City and Other Stories

“Market Street, a steamy puddle at every curb. We find our way down alleys, our crazy eyes making diamonds of the shattered glass that covers the streets and sidewalks. Nothing touches us. We float under the orange streetlamps.”
― Jennifer Egan, Emerald City

“wishes she were daring, risqué, all the things she has never been and will never be.”
― Jennifer Egan, Emerald City

“Bernadette longs for this moment as if it had already passed, as if it could have been. Yet here it is.”
― Jennifer Egan, Emerald City

“We all got into it, cracking walnut shells with our shoes, pulling the sweet white meat from inside while a crowd of our Chinese hosts eyed us with bemused perplexity. “Americans,” I imagined them saying, afterward. “The poor sons of bitches have everything in the world, but they’ve never tasted fresh walnuts.”
― Jennifer Egan, Emerald City