Jennifer Egan Quotes
If having a story that's compelling - you want to know what will happen - is traditional, then ultimately I am a traditionalist. That is what readers care about. It's what I care about as a reader. Now if I can have that along with a strong girding of ideas and some kind of exciting technical forays - then that is just the jackpot.
Quotes to Explore
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I'm a Nietzschean scholar. I've read an immense amount about nihilism and existentialism.
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I remember once I read a book on mental illness and there was a nurse that had gotten sick. Do you know what she died from? From worrying about the mental patients not being able to get their food. She became a mental patient.
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I see the city as an organism, shaped through time by the little humans having habits and doing millions of stuff in and out of it.
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We advance on our journey only when we face our goal, when we are confident and believe we are going to win out.
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Everyone thinks their family is the craziest family in the world. Like, 'My God, my family's crazy!'
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I didn't know what was going through my mind.
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I love babies. I love being pregnant and I loved giving birth.
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This is the moment when we must come together to save this planet. Let us resolve that we will not leave our children a world where the oceans rise and famine spreads and terrible storms devastate our lands.
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I remember when I was in third grade, I was in a classroom, and the teacher said, 'What do you want to do when you get older?' We were going around the room. I said, 'I want to be a professional basketball player.' She's like, 'That's not realistic.' I thought to myself, 'OK, watch.'
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Everybody who does anything for the public can be criticized. There's always someone who doesn't like it.
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I have been in America only once since Mr. Clinton became your president - as a speaker at the United Nations.
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We did a lot of those road trips, all the mandatory stuff that you should when you're a kid, like Mount Rushmore and the Grand Canyon and the Sequoias and the western coast.
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I think I'd be a great mom, honestly. I don't think I'll have any problem giving them all the love in the world. Discipline will be the hard part.
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Especially on unexpected journeys, you have time; you can figure certain deeper things out, like who you are and what you want. That's why I enjoy journeys.
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It is better to have a lion at the head of an army of sheep, than a sheep at the head of an army of lions.
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When you judge another, you do not define them, you define yourself.
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I am jealous of all those people who live on the shore of Dal Lake.
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There are Katy-Perry-in-concert-type pieces that I look at and am like, 'This dress has a hundred cupcakes on it – I want it!' My mom will always talk me down.
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Religion looms as large as an elephant in the United States, to the point that being nonreligious is about the biggest handicap a politician running for office can have, bigger than being gay, unmarried, thrice married, or black.
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Because the sin which she encouraged him to commit was in all likelihood a sin of sensuality, woman is more intensely exposed to the danger of descent into stark carnality. And when this happens, she always becomes once again the evil seductress, whereas, paradoxically, God has specifically enjoined her to combat evil.
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Sometimes you can do all the right things and not succeed. And that's a hard lesson of reality.
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I had done the sitcom thing to lesser and lesser degrees of success.
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If having a story that's compelling - you want to know what will happen - is traditional, then ultimately I am a traditionalist. That is what readers care about. It's what I care about as a reader. Now if I can have that along with a strong girding of ideas and some kind of exciting technical forays - then that is just the jackpot.
