Jennifer Egan

“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?”

“Rich children are always blond, Jocelyn goes. It has to do with vitamins.”

“When the clock stops on a life, all things emanating from it become precious, finite, and cordoned off for preservation. Each aspect of the dead person is removed from the flux of the everyd...”

“That's what death is, Danny thought: wanting to talk to someone and not being able to.”

“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 includ...”

“Time’s a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?” Scotty shook his head. “The goon won.”

“Time's a goon right? Isn't that the expression?”

“Soiled, forgotten coats of arms were carved above their massive doorways, and these unsettled Ted: such universal, defining symbols made meaningless by nothing more than time.”

“By now it was afternoon. Ted began to walk, still dazed, until he found himself among a skein of backstreets so narrow they felt dark. He passed churches blistered with grime, moldering pala...”

“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 t...”

“I've never been that confident. I don't tend to think, swaggeringly, 'I'm going to ace this.' It's just not who I am.”

“That adage about 'Write what you know' is basically the opposite of the way I function. I write about what I'm curious to find out.”

“Not to brag, but I do think I've gotten pretty adept on PowerPoint... except that I can't figure out how to use Excel!”

“The music industry is an interesting lens through which to look at change, because it has had such a difficult time adjusting to the digital age.”

“I'm obsessed with the Victorian novel. I can't help it. I feel like the novel then was so powerful and agile in ways I'm not sure it is now.”

“Both my own process and that of the publishing industry are just too slow to do anything other than play catch-up when it comes to anticipating change.”

“I had this idea that I could hire myself out as a person to go on archeological digs and dig, without any training! I actually wrote to a number of archeology departments and offered up my s...”

“Like many people of my generation, I feel like I survived my adolescent mischief only by a miracle, and it seems too much to hope for that the same miracle would befall my children - therefo...”

“That American confidence is more alive and well than it should be, to this day. But it's such a problem. There's a blindness to that confidence, a presumption that what's good for me is good...”

“I grew up in the 1970s, and my friends and I felt very keenly that we had missed the '60s. We were bummed out about it.”