Jennifer Egan Quotes

Some people put up a peace sign with one hand. Some people put up the middle finger instead. I use two hands and put up both.

Two seemingly incompatible conceptions can each represent an aspect of the truth ... They may serve in turn to represent the facts without ever entering into direct conflict.

That's been a huge recurring thing in growing up - allowing two things to exist in the same space even though, instinctively, they might not be designated to.

A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.

The thing about Wagner is we're always wrong about him, because he always embraces opposites. There are things in his operas which viewed one way are naturalistic, and viewed another way are symbolic, but the problem is you can't represent both views on stage at once.

Life has never been All or Nothing- it's All and Nothing. Forget the binaries.

I write a world where everyone is partly right.

You may find many contradictory statements and philosophies within my writings. However, to this I will say such is life, for life is full of contradictions.

I go back and forth between wanting to be abundantly simple and maddeningly complex.

Life is that perfect fine line between ironies.

Contradiction was something I really like when it is embraced in that kind of philosophy.

We shall never war except for peace.

In the affairs of men, there always appears to be a need for at least two things simultaneously, which, on the face of it, seem to be incompatible and to exclude one another. We always need both freedom and order

Wagner is contrapuntal in a philosophical way as well as a musical way. What I mean by that is that every tendency has its opposite, and you see that in the man himself. He's a metaphysical hermaphrodite - he embraces hard and soft, masculine and feminine.

It took me a long time to learn both good and bad can exist simultaneously.

They don't have to choose either/or. They can have their cake and mutilate it too.

I think the world is always improving and always not improving. I think that both are simultaneously happening all the time.

The unnatural, that too is natural.

It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.

I think the phrase that resonates from 'Just One Year' is something I sort of live by: 'The truth and its opposite are flip sides of the same coin.'

What bothers most critics of my work is the goofiness. One reviewer said I need to make up my mind if want to be funny or serious. My response is that I will make up my mind when God does, because life is a commingling of the sacred and the profane, good and evil. To try and separate them is fallacy.

Love has its place, as does hate. Peace has its place, as does war. Mercy has its place, as do cruelty and revenge.

I guess I found it useful to realise that everything is true at once, you know? You can pull back and say, 'Everything will be fine,' but you can also be in a situation and say, 'Not everything is going to be fine.'

I think I'm a combination of very simple pleasures and the fact I've read a lot of books. I don't think it's a binary opposition across the board in humans and I think I'm an example that it's not. I'm hosting gay marriage rallies and I have tons of guns at home. There's a lot of middle ground in the world and I'm one of those people.

The combination of domesticity and wildness - that's a deep expression.