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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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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After coming to India, I have felt the loneliest I have ever been in my life. I don't have a support system here.
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I have a strong desire to communicate what I feel about the world. That's exciting to me.
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I'm not going to ask musicians to sit there and pretend to play. It feels insulting to the musicians to me.
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It is circumstance and proper measure that give an action its character, and make it either good or bad.
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I tend more towards what some people call literary science fiction, but what I mean by that is that it is full of interesting language, experimentation, and ideas.
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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.
