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
The part of the process that's exciting to me is feeling like I'm in a place I've never been before, in every way. Without that, I don't know if I'd be a writer.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The thrill of exploring uncharted territories fuels the passion for writing.
Jennifer Egan expresses that the essence of her writing lies in the excitement of immersion in new experiences and perspectives. This sense of discovery is crucial for her creative process, suggesting that for her, growth and exploration are integral to her identity as a writer.
Themes
WritingInspirationExplorationGrowthCreativity
In practice
Example use cases
In a motivational speech about pursuing passions.
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.
Jennifer EganRead
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.
Jennifer EganRead
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.
Jennifer EganRead
And Alex understood that Scotty Hausmann did not exist. He was a word casing in human form: a shell whose essence has vanished.
Jennifer EganRead
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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