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 think the big lesson I've learned is that it's very hard to write satire in America because almost immediately, whatever you've thought of turns out to come true, or sometimes it already was true.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Writing satire in America is challenging because reality often mirrors or preempts the imagined scenarios.
Jennifer Egan reflects on the difficulty of crafting satire in America, noting that the unpredictability and absurdity of real-life events often overshadow the satirical ideas that writers may come up with. This underscores the uncanny ability of reality to outpace our imagination, making it hard to invent situations that seem exaggerated or far-fetched.
Themes
SatireAmericaRealityTruthWriting
In practice
Example use cases
This quote is perfect for a lecture about the role of satire in contemporary society.
More from Jennifer Egan
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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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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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