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

— Jennifer Egan

It made me alert, like someone had scrubbed mint all over my skin. I'd walk into that stinking, miserable prison and for the next three hours, a wise and beautiful woman would float out of the wreckage of my life, and her words and thoughts and tiniest movements were precious.

— Jennifer Egan

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

— Jennifer Egan

It was the hat. He looked sweet in the hat. How could a man in a fuzzy blue hat have used human bones to pave his roads?

— Jennifer Egan

I would lie of course. I lied a lot and with good reason: to protect the truth—safeguard it like wearing fake gems to keep the real ones from getting stolen or cheapened by overuse. Furthermore, I guarded what truths I possessed because information was not a thing—it was colorless odorless shapeless and therefore indestructible. There was no way to retrieve or void it no way to halt its proliferation. Telling someone a secret was like storing plutonium inside a sandwich bag the information would inevitably outlive the friendship or love or trust in which you’d placed it. And then you would have given it away.

— Jennifer Egan

Kathy was a Republican, one of those people who used the unforgivable phrase "meant to be"--usually when describing her own good fortune or the disasters that had befallen other people.

— Jennifer Egan

Like all failed experiments, that one taught me something I didn’t expect: one key ingredient of so-called experience is the delusional faith that it is unique and special, that those included in it are privileged and those excluded from it are missing out.

— Jennifer Egan

Like all failed experiments, that one taught me something I didn’t expect: one key ingredient of so-called experience is the delusional faith that it is unique and special, that those included in it are privileged and those excluded from it are missing out. And I, like a scientist unwittingly inhaling toxic fumes from the beaker I was boiling in my lab, had, through sheer physical proximity, been infected by that same delusion and in my drugged state had come to believe I was Excluded: condemned to stand shivering outside the public library at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street forever and...

— Jennifer Egan

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 rarer, which is freckles: I look like someone threw handfuls of mud at my face.

— Jennifer Egan

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.

— Jennifer Egan