361 Quotes by Jennifer Egan

I like to be near water whenever possible, don’t you?” he said, gazing into the dark. “Melville put it best: ‘Nothing will content men but the extremest limit of the land’ – but that’s not it, I can’t recall the quote. It’s in our nature to seek out the edge. Even on a golf course.

We work in the realm of the impression.” Nell hailed a taxi and directed the driver to East.

I hope to keep writing journalism as long as I write fiction; it’s afforded me such amazing adventures and opportunities. It does take a lot of time, so it’s hard to do both at once, but I try to do a big journalism piece every couple of years, and I’ll hopefully continue with that.

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.

Everyone we’ve lost, we’ll find. Or they’ll find us.

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.

You can do it alone. But it’s going to be so much harder.

I think the one thing that’s changed over time is that I’ve come to realise, as a fiction writer, the fact that I don’t think it will work out, doesn’t mean that it actually won’t.

We’re the survivors. Not everyone is. But we are.