some mornings... I sit at the kitchen table shaking salt into the hairs on my arm, and a feeling shoves up in me: it's finished. Everything went past without me.
Jennifer EganRead
I have this dream again and again: I find extra rooms in the place where I live. You could say it's a very New York dream, but I think it's about writing - the feeling that there is something behind a wall or a door.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects the idea of exploring hidden potentials in writing and life, symbolized by discovering extra rooms.
Jennifer Egan's quote conveys a metaphorical dream about the act of writing, suggesting that just as one may discover hidden rooms in familiar spaces, so too can a writer uncover deeper meanings and ideas that lie behind the surface of their experiences. This dream symbolizes the endless possibilities for creativity and exploration inherent in the writing process, encouraging awareness of what lies beneath the known.
Themes
DreamWritingCreativityExplorationPotential
In practice
Example use cases
Sharing this quote during a writing workshop to inspire participants to explore their imagination.
More from Jennifer Egan
All quotes →I think there are ways in which we censor ourselves; that's the most dangerous kind of censorship - that's how hegemony works.
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I find myself thinking more about the past as I get older... maybe because there's just more of it to think about. At the same time, I'm less haunted by it than I was as a younger person. I guess that's probably the ideal: to reach a point where you have access to all of your memories, but you don't feel victimized by them.
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I think, for one thing, all of us remember those teenage years and those songs that we fell in love with and the music scene that we were part of. So, in a certain way, music cuts through time like almost nothing else. You know, it makes us feel like we're back in an earlier moment.
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And Alex understood that Scotty Hausmann did not exist. He was a word casing in human form: a shell whose essence has vanished.
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We live in a moment and a culture when reading is really endangered. There's simply no way to write well, though, if you're not reading well.
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