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
Training readers to expect a voice or subject matter from me would interfere with the reinvention I crave. At the same time, I feel almost too able to disappear at times.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects the struggle between the desire for creative freedom and the pressure to conform to expectations.
Jennifer Egan expresses the internal conflict of a creator in this quote. She values the ability to reinvent herself and her work, suggesting that if readers come to expect a certain style or topic from her, it would hinder her creative evolution. At the same time, she acknowledges a feeling of anonymity that may accompany such freedom, hinting at the loneliness that can come from distancing oneself from audience expectations.
Themes
CreativityReinventionExpectationsArtistic FreedomIdentity
In practice
Example use cases
During a literary seminar, you might quote this to illustrate the challenges authors face.
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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