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In a way, I'm always trying to do something I'm not qualified to do. So I feel that lack of qualification. And I'm scared. And I have a tendency to think things may not/probably won't work out. That's my basic mindset.
Jennifer Egan
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Interpretation

What this quote means

The quote reflects the struggle of feeling unqualified in various pursuits and the accompanying fear of failure.

Jennifer Egan expresses a common experience of undertaking challenges where one feels they lack the necessary qualifications. This mindset of self-doubt and fear is juxtaposed with the willingness to pursue these challenges, highlighting a universal human experience of vulnerability when stepping outside one's comfort zone.

Themes

Self-DoubtFearQualificationChallengeGrowth

In practice

Example use cases

In a motivational speech about embracing challenges despite fear.

More from Jennifer Egan

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.
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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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