{"author":"Jennifer Egan","author_id":"Jennifer+Egan","total_quotes":58,"quotes":[{"text":"...Our familiar features rinsed in weird adulthood.","author":"Jennifer Egan","tags":["aging"],"id":3195,"author_id":"Jennifer+Egan"},{"text":"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. 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.","author":"Jennifer Egan","tags":["lies"],"id":6253,"author_id":"Jennifer+Egan"},{"text":"Rebecca was an academic star. Her new book was on the phenomenon of word casings, a term she'd invented for words that no longer had meaning outside quotation marks. English was full of these empty words--'friend' and 'real' and 'story' and 'change'--words that had been shucked of their meanings and reduced to husks. Some, like 'identity' and 'search' and 'cloud,' had clearly been drained of life by their Web usage. With others, the reasons were more complex; how had 'American' become an ironic term? How had 'democracy' come to be used in an arch, mocking way?","author":"Jennifer Egan","tags":["america","democracy","disgust","language","web","wit"],"id":9125,"author_id":"Jennifer+Egan"},{"text":"But Phoebe loved her mother best as she was now, wistful, out-of-step, her laugh tinged always with sadness, as if things were only funny in spite of themselves.","author":"Jennifer Egan","tags":["daughter","humor","mother","sad"],"id":17552,"author_id":"Jennifer+Egan"},{"text":"A frenzy of activity that had mostly led him in circles: wasn't that a fairly accurate description of lust? At times Bennie didn't even mind its disappearance; it was sort of a relief not to be constantly wanting to fuck someone. The world was unquestionably a more peaceful place without the half hard-on that had been his constant companion since the age of thirteen, but did Bennie want to live in such a world?","author":"Jennifer Egan","tags":["lust"],"id":22434,"author_id":"Jennifer+Egan"},{"text":"...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.","author":"Jennifer Egan","tags":["nostalgia"],"id":28103,"author_id":"Jennifer+Egan"},{"text":"I guess it’s always romantic when two people fall in love.... Even if it turns out not to be real.","author":"Jennifer Egan","tags":["love-hurts"],"id":32810,"author_id":"Jennifer+Egan"},{"text":"Rich children are always blond, Jocelyn goes. It has to do with vitamins.","author":"Jennifer Egan","tags":["humor"],"id":61204,"author_id":"Jennifer+Egan"},{"text":"I smoked my first pipe with Seth. I knew the stuff was bad, but I was so tired of being the cop, begging and ragging at him, throwing Pampers in his face when he walked in the door. I wanted to be on the same side again. So I smoked with Seth one afternoon when the girls were napping, and oh my God, I can only think about this for a minute or every part of me will turn into a mouth wanting more: the sexiness of it, fucking Seth like wild for the first time in months, going on even when the girls started to whimper and bang on the door. Then looking out the window and seeing the world shake itself to life: the heavy trees, the sky. And I was back on top. We were going to make it, Seth and I. The voice in my head was back again, telling me stories, too many to write down or even tell one from another.","author":"Jennifer Egan","tags":["addiction","drugs","meth"],"id":67973,"author_id":"Jennifer+Egan"},{"text":"You can only write regularly if you’re willing to write badly… Accept bad writing as a way of priming the pump, a warm-up exercise that allows you to write well.","author":"Jennifer Egan","tags":["writing-advice"],"id":72074,"author_id":"Jennifer+Egan"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":58,"pages":6,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}