Jennifer Egan

“The seconds pass. I know what’s going on because it’s the same thing that always happens: give me something nice, something I love or want or need, and I’ll find a way to grind it into dust.”

“I wider that all the time - what will happen next" Kitty says. "sometimes, I imagine myself looking back on right now and I think, like, where will I be standing when I look back? Will right now look like the beginning of a great life or... Or what?”

“I sensed immediately that he'd once been overweight. He moved with a fat person's tiptoey apology.”

“As you flail, knowing you’re not supposed to panic – panicking will drain your strength – your mind pulls away as it does so easily, so often, without your even noticing sometimes, leaving Robert Freeman Jr. to manage the current alone while you withdraw to the broader landscape, the water and buildings and streets, the avenues like endless hallways, your dorm full of sleeping students, the air thick with their communal breath. You slip through Sasha’s open window, floating over the sill lined with artifacts from her travels: a white seashell, a small gold pagoda, a pair of red dice. Her harp in one corner with its small wood stool. She’s asleep in her narrow bed, her burned red hair dark against the sheets. You kneel beside her, breathing the familiar smell of Sasha’s sleep, whispering into her ear some mix of I’m sorry and I believe in you and I’ll always be near you, protecting you, and I will never leave you, I’ll be curled around your heart for the rest of your life, until the water pressing my shoulders and chest crushes me awake and I hear Sasha screaming into my face: Fight! Fight! Fight!”

“Oh we'll know each other for forever' Bix said. 'The days of losing touch are almost gone.' 'What does that mean? ' Drew asks.'We're going to meet again in a different place,' Bix said. 'Everyone we've lost, we'll find. Or they'll find us.”

“... see how everything now is precious, how someday I'll know I was lucky to be here.”

“With a sudden pressure heralded by pricks of sweat along my drastically receding hairline, I swab the bottom of my salad plate with a vast hunk of bread and jam it into my mouth like a dentist packing a tooth. And just then-ah yes-I feel the niggling onset of a sneeze; here it comes, Hail Mary, bread or no bread, nothing can halt the shouting simultaneous eruption of every cavity in my head.”

“There are things you're just positive will happen to you. Then there's that second when you realize, Jesus Christ. Maybe they won't.”

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

“Thousands of solar panels lift and tilt at the same time, in the same way. I clutch at Dad's arm: "Why are they doing that?" "They're collecting moonlight," Dad says, and I remember: it's weaker, but we use it.”

“No one is waiting for me. In this story, I’m the girl no one is waiting for. Usually the girl is fat, but my problem is more rare, which is freckles: I look like someone threw handfuls of mud at my face.”

“I’m sorry and I believe in you and I’ll always be near you, protecting you, and I will never leave you, I’ll be curled around your heart for the rest of your life.”

“It is technically impossible for a man to look better in a Speedo than in swim trunks.”

“Kind of like saying 'no offense' when you've just said something offensive?”

“Then tell them, faintly, 'I heard screaming'. Men with a history of violence live in fear of retribution.”

“[I]t may be that a crowd at a particular moment of history creates the object to justify its gathering.”

“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.”

“And the feeling I had was not of wanting her so much as being surrounded by her, blundering inside her life without having moved.”

“Danny had no idea what the thing was. All he knew was that he lived more or less in a constant state of expecting something any day, any hour, that would change everything, knock the world upside down and put Danny's whole life into perspective as a story of complete success, because every twist and turn and snag and fuckup would always have been leading up to this. Unexpected stuff could hit him like the thing at first: a girl he'd forgotten giving his number to suddenly calling up out of the blue, a friend with some genius plan for making money, better yet a person he'd never heard of who wanted to talk. Danny got an actual physical head rush from messages like these, but as soon as he called back and found out the details, the calls would turn out to just be about more projects, possibilities, schemes that boiled down to everything staying exactly like it was.”

“At the beginning he’d thought of his style as being his essence, the perfect expression of who he was inside, but lately the styles had started to feel like disguises, distractions Danny could move around behind without being seen. 27”

“And for an instant he would remember Naples: sitting with Sasha in her tiny room; the jolt of surprise and delight he'd felt when the sun finally dropped into the center of her window and was captured inside her circle of wire.Now he turned to her, grinning. Her hair and face were aflame with orange light."See," Sasha muttered, eyeing the sun. "It's mine.”

“Time's a goon right?You gonna let that goon push you around?”

“It's finished. Everything went past, without me.”

“...our familiar features rinsed in weird adulthood.”

“That's factually crazy...”

“Suddenly I'm scared.That the solar panels were a time machine.That I'm a grown-up woman coming back to this place after many years.That my parents are gone, and our house isn't ours anymore.It's a broken down ruin with no one in it.Living here all together was so sweet.Even when we fought.It felt like it would never end. I'll always miss it.”

“Das mine!' protested Ava, Bennie's daughter, affirming Alex's recent theory that language acquisition involved a phase of speaking German. She snatched a plastic skillet away from his own daughter, Cara-Ann, who lurched after it, roaring, 'Mine pot! Mine pot!”

“Jules turned to her, incredulous. 'Do you socialize with Republicans?'"'It happens, Jules.”

“Vinegar: that's what fear smells like.”

“That's how New York looked: like a gorgeous, easy thing to have, even for me.”

“He seemed to savor telling the story, as if he'd memorized its details especially for her: how three or four days after she and Lulu had left the general's redoubt, the photographers began showing up, first one or two whom the soldiers ferreted out of the jungle and imprisoned, then more, too many to capture or even count-they were superb hiders, crouching like monkeys in the trees, burying themselves i shallow pits camouflaging inside bunches of leaves. Assassins has never managed to locate the general with any precision, but the photographers made it look easy: scores of them surging across the border without visas, curled in baskets and wine casks, rolled up in rugs, juddering over unpaved roads in the backs of trucks and eventually surrounding the general's enclave, which he didn't dare leave.”

“Power is like that; everyone feels it at once.”

“I looked down at the city. Its extravagance felt wasteful, like gushing oil or some other precious thing Bennie was hoarding for himself, using it up so no one else could get any. I thought: if I had a view like this to look down on every day, I would have the energy and inspiration to conquer the world. The trouble is, when you most need such a view, no one gives it to you.”

“It wore on Stephanie more than she'd expected, dropping off Chris for kindergarten, waving or smiling at some blond mother releasing blond progeny from her SUV or Hummer, and getting back a pinched, quizzical smile whose translation seemed to be: Who are you again? How could they not know, after months of daily mutual sightings? They were snobs or idiots or both, Stephanie told herself, yet she was inexplicably crushed by their coldness.”

“I think ethical ambivalence is a kind of innoculation, a way of excusing yourself in advance for something you actually want to do. No offense.”

“Sasha's green eyes were right up against yours, the lashes interlocking. "In Naples," she said, "there were kids who were just lost. You knew they were never going to get back to what they'd been, or have a normal life. And then there were other ones who you thought, maybe they will."...You opened your eyes, which you hadn't realized were shut again. "what I'm saying is, We're the survivors," Sasha said...."Not everyone is. But we are. Okay?”

“Bennie has light brown skin and excellent eyes, and he irons his hair in a Mohawk as shiny black as a virgin record.”

“He gestured at the girl I'd been dealing with, whose carefree smile could be roughly translated as: 'He's officially not my problem anymore.' I gave her a wink whose exact translation was: 'Don't be so sure, darling.”

“She looks like someone I want to know, or maybe even be.”

“Her face was fragile and mischievous, pale enough to absorb hues from the world around her-purple, green, pink-like a face painted by Lucian Freud.”

“It's turning out to be a bad day, a day when the sun feels like teeth.”

“Oh we'll know each other forever, Bix says. The days of losing touch are almost gone.”

“Behind the desk was nothing but view-the whole city flung out in front of us the way street vendors fling out their towels packed with cheap, glittery watches and belts. That's how New York looked: like gorgeous, easy thing to have, even for me.”

“Here was the bottom line: if we human beings are information processing machines, reading X's and O's and translating that information into what people oh so breathlessly call "experience," and if I had access to all that same information via cable TV and any number of magazines that I browsed through at Hudson News for four- and five- hour stretches on my free days (my record was eight hours, including the half hour I spent manning the register during the lunch break of one of the younger employees, who though I worked there)- if I had not only the information but the artisty to shape that information using the computer inside my brain (real computers scared me; if you can find Them, then They can find you, and I didn't want to be found), then, technically speaking, was I not having all of the same experiences those other people were having?”

“If we human beings are information processing machines, reading X's & O's and translating that information into what people oh so breathlessly call "experience", & if I had not only the information but the artistry to shape that information using the computer inside my brain, then, technically speaking, was I not having all the same experiences those other people were having?”

“...underneath that I'd said something else: we were both a couple of asswipes, and now only I'm an asswipe; why? And underneath that, something else: once an asswipe, always an asswipe.”

“They were snobs or idiots or both...yet she was inexplicably crushed by their coldness.”

“What I Suddenly UnderstandMy job is to make people uncomfortable. + I will do it all my life. ---> My mother, Sasha Blake, is my first victim.”

“As Ted sat, feeling the evolution of the afternoon, he found himself thinking of Susan. Not the slightly different version of Susan, but Susan herself — his wife — on a day many years ago, before Ted had begun folding up his desire into the tiny shape it had become. On a trip to New York, riding the Staten Island Ferry for fun, because neither one of them had ever done it, Susan turned to him suddenly and said, "Let's make sure it's always like this." And so entwined were their thoughts at that point that Ted knew exactly why she'd said it: not because they'd made love that morning or drunk a bottle of Pouilly-Fuisse at lunch — because she'd felt the passage of time. And then Ted felt it, too, in the leaping brown water, the scudding boats and wind — motion, chaos everywhere — and he'd held Susan's hand and said, "Always. It will always be like this.”

“They were not permitted to so much as knock upon the door to the room in which he thought and wrote about art, but ted hadn't found a way to keep them from prowling outside it, ghostly feral creatures drinking from a pond at moonlight, their bare feet digging in the carpet....”