Quote

Her only thought was of getting away, as if she were carrying a live grenade from inside the house, so that when it exploded, it would destroy just herself.

Jennifer Egan

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Jennifer Egan
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: September 7
Novelist
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Would
Carrying
Destroy
Inside
Getting
House
Away
Thought
Grenade
Live
Exploded

More quotes by Jennifer Egan

Image
It's turning out to be a bad day, a day when the sun feels like teeth.
Jennifer Egan
Image
What he needed was to find fifty more people like him, who had stopped being themselves without realizing it.
Jennifer Egan
Image
Because you can't write habitually and well all the time, you have to be willing to write badly. That's how you get the regularity that enables you to be present for the good stuff.
Jennifer Egan
Image
I'm very interested in the way the Internet has changed teenage life. Obviously it's very different from when I grew up, when there weren't even answering machines, much less computers. I was telling my children this the other day, and the little one said, Did you have electricity, Mom? and I was like okay, enough, kid.
Jennifer Egan
Image
I don’t want to fade away, I want to flame away - I want my death to be an attraction, a spectacle, a mystery. A work of art.
Jennifer Egan
Image
That we have some history together that hasn’t happened yet.
Jennifer Egan
Image
One area I have a huge amount of trouble in is writing about myself. I get a heavy, almost depressed feeling.
Jennifer Egan
Image
What I Suddenly Understand My job is to make people uncomfortable. + I will do it all my life. ---> My mother, Sasha Blake, is my first victim.
Jennifer Egan
Image
Even the financial disclosure statements that political bloggers were required to post hadn't stemmed the suspicion that people's opinions weren't really their own. Who's paying you? was a retort that might follow any bout of enthusiasm, along with laughter - who would let themselves be bought?
Jennifer Egan
Image
It's finished. Everything went past, without me.
Jennifer Egan
Image
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
Image
[I]t may be that a crowd at a particular moment of history creates the object to justify its gathering.
Jennifer Egan
Image
I don't really know where my ideas come from. I start with a time and a place. That's what I need to get started, and an intellectual question.
Jennifer Egan
Image
I haven't had writer's block. I think it's because my process involves writing very badly.
Jennifer Egan
Image
So I feel that lack of qualification. And I'm scared. And I have a tendency to think things may not/probably won't work out. That's my basic mindset.
Jennifer Egan
Image
There's a fine line between thinking about somebody and thinking about not thinking about somebody, but I have the patience and the self-control to walk that line for hours - days, if I have to.
Jennifer Egan
Image
There are so many ways to go wrong. All we've got are metaphors, and they're never exactly right. You can never just Say. The. Thing.
Jennifer Egan
Image
Nineteen eighty is almost here, thank God. the hippies are getting old, they blew their brains on acid and now they're begging on street corners all over San Francisco. Their hair is tangled and their bare feet are thick and gray as shoes. We're sick of them.
Jennifer Egan
Image
There's something very strange about associating me with that prize. I had hoped for it in a more directed way as a journalist. Somehow as a journalist you know there are Pulitzers out there and you can work hard and get one. To win it for Fiction seems unbelievable.
Jennifer Egan
Image
We're [writers] all afraid of writing badly, and there are psychological reasons, like the bad interior of ourselves is somehow being revealed, but we all fear that, and you can't write well if you're not willing to write badly. That's why you have to make writing a habit, so it feels normal and not strange.
Jennifer Egan