Jennifer Egan - A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010)

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

Jennifer Egan
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.

Jennifer Egan
That we have some history together that hasn't happened yet.

Jennifer Egan
Everybody sounds stoned, because they're e-mailing people the whole time they're talking to you.

Jennifer Egan
He looks tired, like someone walked on his skin and left footprints.

Jennifer Egan
The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh.

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
Structural dissatisfaction: Returning to circumstances that once pleased you, after having experienced a more thrilling or opulent way of life, and finding that you can no longer tolerate them.

Jennifer Egan
Reach isn't describable in terms of cause and effect anymore: it's simultaneous.

Jennifer Egan
They were snobs or idiots or both...yet she was inexplicably crushed by their coldness.

Jennifer Egan
The sky was electric blue above the trees but the yard felt dark. Stephanie went to the edge of the lawn and sat her forehead on her knees. The grass and soil were still warm from the day. She wanted to cry but she couldn't. The feeling was too deep.

Jennifer Egan
And it's all kind of moving and sweet except that you're not completely there—a part of you is a few feet away, or above, thinking,

Jennifer Egan
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.

Jennifer Egan
Happened as I listened: I felt pain. Not in my head, not in my arm, not in my leg; everywhere at once. I told myself there was no difference between being inside and being outside, that it all came down to X's and O's that could be acquired in any number of different ways, but the pain increased to a point where I thought I might collapse, and I limped away.

Jennifer Egan
The world is full of shitheads, Rhea. Don't listen to them—listen to me. And I know that Lou is one of those shitheads. But I listen.

Jennifer Egan
Now that Scotty has entered the realm of myth, everyone wants to own him. And maybe they should. Doesn't a myth belong to everyone?

Jennifer Egan
He remembered his mentor, Lou Kline, telling him in the nineties that rock and roll had peaked at Monterey Pop. They'd been in Lou's house in LA with its waterfalls, the pretty girls Lou always had, his car collection out front, and Bennie had looked into his idol's famous face and thought, You're finished. Nostalgia was the end - everyone knew that.

Jennifer Egan
Even the financial disclosure statements that political bloggers were required to post hadn't stemmed the suspicion that people's opinions weren't really their own. "Who's paying you?" was a retort that might follow any bout of enthusiasm, along with laughter - who would let themselves be bought?

Jennifer Egan
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

Jennifer Egan
I think, The world is actually huge. That's the part no one can really explain.

Jennifer Egan
What he needed was to find fifty more people like him, who had stopped being themselves without realizing it.

Jennifer Egan
And it may be that a crowd at a particular moment of history creates the object to justify its gathering, as it did at the first Human Be-In and Monterey Pop and Woodstock. Or it may be that two generations of war and surveillance had left people craving the embodiment of their own unease in the form of a lone, unsteady man on a slide guitar.

Jennifer Egan
This is the music business. 'Five years is five hundred years' - your words.

Jennifer Egan
I can't tell if she's actually real, or if she's stopped caring if she's real or not. Or is not caring what makes a person real?

Jennifer Egan
They resumed walking. Alex felt an ache in his eyes and throat. "I don't know what happened to me," he said, shaking his head. "I honestly don't." Bennie glanced at him, a middle-aged man with chaotic silver hair and thoughtful eyes. "You grew up, Alex," he said, "just like the rest of us.

Jennifer Egan
But it was another girl, young and new to the city, fiddling with her keys.

Jennifer Egan
She'd risked everything, and here was the result: the raw, warped core of her life.

Jennifer Egan
Her only thought was of getting away, as if she were carrying a live grenade from inside the house, so that when it exploded, it would destroy just herself.

Jennifer Egan
When does a fake Mohawk become a real Mohawk? Who decides? How do you know if it's happened?

Jennifer Egan
No one is waiting for me. In this story, I'm the girl no one is waiting for.

Jennifer Egan