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 learned you have to move fast, writing futuristic satire in America: Before you know it, you're a realist!
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote suggests that satirical writing about the future can quickly become reality, emphasizing the rapid changes in society.
Jennifer Egan's quote highlights the irony of writing satire that anticipates future events or trends, only to find that those exaggerated ideas can manifest into reality very quickly. It speaks to the unpredictable nature of society and its rapid evolution, where what seems like a humorous or critical exaggeration today can very well be the norm tomorrow, urging writers to keep pace with the world around them.
Themes
SatireRealismSocietyChangeWriting
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about modern literature, you can use this quote to illustrate the blurred lines between satire and reality.
More from Jennifer Egan
All quotes βI 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.
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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