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 answers were maddeningly absent—it was like trying to remember a song that you knew made you feel a certain way, without a title, artist, or even a few bars to bring it back.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote expresses the frustration of searching for understanding or clarity in experiences that are difficult to articulate.
Jennifer Egan's quote highlights the perplexing nature of human emotions and memories. It portrays the struggle of trying to recall a specific feeling or insight when the details are elusive, akin to trying to remember a song without any cues. This metaphor emphasizes how certain experiences can leave a profound impact even when they cannot be fully articulated, illustrating the complexity of human emotions and the challenges inherent in making sense of them.
Themes
MemoryFeelingsEmotionUnderstandingArticulation
In practice
Example use cases
This quote could be used in a discussion about the difficulty of expressing deep emotions.
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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