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 a wildly gifted person; I don't play an instrument or speak another language or have great accomplishments in another field, as many writers do. But writing feels natural to me; the act of it seems to free up my unconscious, so that sometimes I feel that I have access to more ideas and information than my conscious mind could think up.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Writing allows for a deeper connection to one's subconscious and creativity, regardless of external skills or accomplishments.
In this quote, Jennifer Egan expresses that while she may not possess traditional talents or notable achievements in various fields, writing is a natural and freeing act for her. It suggests that the creative process can lead to a flow of ideas and insights that go beyond conscious thought, emphasizing the intrinsic value of writing as a form of artistic expression.
Themes
WritingCreativitySubconsciousExpressionArtistic
In practice
Example use cases
In a writing workshop, to encourage participants to embrace their natural writing abilities.
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.
Jennifer EganRead
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