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 grew up thinking you're either a winner in the world, or you're not. I presumed I was not. I had no reason to think I would be, and my inclination is towards self-deprecation. I wish I'd known no one was judging my every move, but I'm still like this!
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects on the pressure to succeed and the author's struggle with self-doubt.
In this quote, Jennifer Egan expresses the mindset of growing up in a competitive environment where success is seemingly binary—either one is a winner or not. Egan conveys her feelings of inadequacy and self-deprecation, highlighting the internal pressure she placed on herself while suggesting that the fear of judgment from others is often unfounded. Her reflection reveals a common human experience of grappling with self-worth and the importance of recognizing that we are often our own harshest critics.
Themes
Self-DoubtSuccessJudgmentWinnerSelf-Worth
In practice
Example use cases
In a motivational speech about overcoming self-doubt.
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.
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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