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'm not sure if the passage of time affects our core identities so much as reveals them to us.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Time may not change who we are, but it brings our true selves to light.
In this quote, Jennifer Egan suggests that while time itself may not alter our fundamental identities, it plays a crucial role in uncovering and revealing those identities. As we experience life and its various challenges, our core values, beliefs, and traits come to the forefront, providing us with a deeper understanding of ourselves over time.
Themes
TimeIdentitySelf-DiscoveryChangeRevelation
In practice
Example use cases
In a motivational speech about personal growth, this quote can be used to emphasize the importance of self-reflection.
More from Jennifer Egan
All quotes βI 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.
Jennifer EganRead
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