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
To some degree, we're all thinking about the same things. It's the zeitgeist. The trick, in a way, as a writer, is to hope that your interests in some sense link up with the culture around you.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote suggests that writers reflect shared cultural thoughts and sentiments known as the zeitgeist.
Jennifer Egan highlights the interconnectedness of individual thoughts with the broader cultural context, referred to as the zeitgeist. She emphasizes that writers should strive to align their personal interests with the prevailing cultural currents, thus creating work that resonates with a wider audience. The quote proposes that understanding and tapping into collective thoughts can enhance a writer's relevance and connection with readers.
Themes
ZeitgeistCultureWritingConnectivityInterests
In practice
Example use cases
During a writers' workshop, you can use this quote to discuss the importance of cultural awareness in creative writing.
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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