Jennifer Egan Quotes

It took me a long time to blossom. Everyone else understood how to socialize and how to look. I didn't get the memo.

I didn't think Marilyn Monroe was beautiful. It used to worry me. I thought maybe I'm not put together like the other chaps.

If you're already somebody who's feeling different, you'll do everything in your power to fix it because children will do everything in their power to fit in and assimilate.

When I was in school, I got there on the first day and everyone had long, blonde, straight hair, and I had short, dark, curly hair. I immediately felt I didn't fit in and started growing my hair. But I've learned that I'm only happy when I am truly me and feel comfortable and confident in myself.

I was always a class clown, so I never had trouble fitting in; I just had trouble finding out where I really wanted to be.

I would say that my fatal flaw, as a human being, is that I need people to like me, and if they don't like me, I will obsess over it - and try to change my personality until they like me - even if they don't like me for reasons that have nothing to do with me, and even if they're strangers.

Like so many kids, I just wanted to fit in, and I see now that I spent most of my life trying to be what I wasn't, trying to get people to like me.

Don't let that nagging fear - that feeling that being different automatically qualifies you as being wrong - eat away at you.

My hair was always frizzy. I always wanted to be blonde with lovely straight hair. I was very skinny. I was quite tomboyish, just very quiet. I always wanted to fit in; I just couldn't.

I was incredibly shy and insecure as a child. I was bullied. I was dyslexic. I had an immigrant single parent. I was the opposite of that kind of ideal, cool girl thing.

I immigrated when I was six so I had to learn English and I was always an outsider from a young age, and so I think my drive was that I wanted to fit in.

As a kid, I spent a lot of my mental energy hiding who I was and attempting to fit in.

I used to think I was ugly because I was the baby.

When I was four I joined a group of girls who were talking about their party dresses. I thought they were imagining, so I imagined a fantastic pink velvet dress with lots of jewels. But they were simply describing what they actually wore, and they had utter contempt for my obvious fiction. After that, I never joined a group again.

I don't want to change; I just want to be like everyone else. I'm nothing special.

I deeply believed that I wasn't worthy - that I couldn't be in the stories even I was creating. I don't want anyone else to feel like that.

Many times, people would react to the fact that I looked different, and I would think that there was something wrong with me - that maybe one of my shirt buttons was undone or something. It took 20 or 30 years to get used to it.

I've lived my whole life trying to prove that I'm worthy of being a part of something because I never really felt that.

I knew in my heart that I wasn't cool, but I figured I could at least be cool by association.

When you're growing up, you want to feel part of something.

I was totally picked on, but look at me now! I was definitely picked on by boys and girls. I was really lanky and skinny and the boys would say, 'Turn sideways and stick out your tongue, you look like a zipper.'

I want to do well and I want to fit in.

I love playing strong feisty women, I really do, but if you were to ask my husband he'd probably say that I'm very insecure. And actually incredibly malleable, which isn't necessarily a good thing.

I don't always understand my worth.

I was fortunate to have had a lively, happy childhood, but somewhere along the way I convinced myself I wasn't wanted anywhere or by anyone if I wasn't thin.