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
-
I'm a Nietzschean scholar. I've read an immense amount about nihilism and existentialism.
-
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.
-
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.
-
We advance on our journey only when we face our goal, when we are confident and believe we are going to win out.
-
Everyone thinks their family is the craziest family in the world. Like, 'My God, my family's crazy!'
-
I didn't know what was going through my mind.
-
I love babies. I love being pregnant and I loved giving birth.
-
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.
-
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.'
-
Everybody who does anything for the public can be criticized. There's always someone who doesn't like it.
-
I have been in America only once since Mr. Clinton became your president - as a speaker at the United Nations.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
When you judge another, you do not define them, you define yourself.
-
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.
-
After coming to India, I have felt the loneliest I have ever been in my life. I don't have a support system here.
-
I work out five days a week; I can't imagine not doing it.
-
The body moves through space every day, and in architecture in cities that can be orchestrated. Not in a dictatorial fashion, but in a way of creating options, open-ended sort of personal itineraries within a building. And I see that as akin to cinematography or choreography, where episodic movement, episodic moments, occur in dance and film.
-
When you create those characters that people love and care about and put them in a dark hallway, already the audience is on edge, and they feel empathy for that character. Then it's up to me to decide what jumps out in that hallway. So I think laying that foundation of strong characters and strong story is the most important thing in a horror film.
-
I was taught that a lawyer was supposed to be a custodian of the community's legal and ethical sense.
-
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.
