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
But I always need to identify with a character to write about him or her - and by 'identify,' I mean see the world through that person's eyes and have a strong sense of the inner logic of their acts and decisions, wacky or wrongheaded though they might be. In that sense, I think there's some of me in all of them.
Interpretation
What this quote means
To write authentically, an author must connect deeply with their characters and understand their perspectives.
Jennifer Egan highlights the importance of empathy and identification in the writing process. By aligning oneself with a character, an author can explore different perspectives and motivations, allowing for more nuanced and believable storytelling. Egan suggests that every character, no matter how eccentric, carries a part of the author within them, further enriching the narrative with shared human experiences.
Themes
WritingEmpathyCharacterPerspectiveStorytelling
In practice
Example use cases
This quote could be used in a literary workshop to emphasize the importance of empathy in character development.
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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