Jennifer Egan Quotes

I didn't have an incredibly active social life as a teenager. I always wished it was a little bit more exciting than it was.

I grew up in the '70s, when people talked on the phone - and just talked more. I remember the phone was the epicenter of our house. I spent hours every evening as a teenager waiting for the phone to ring and talking to my friends.

When I was young as a teenager, that was the biggest mystery in the world to me: Why don't people connect?

You had to pick up a landline to make sure your best friend wore a matching outfit to school. I do remember people talking more. Nostalgia is dangerous, though.

People simply don't make eye contact anymore.

Remember that as a teenager you are in the last stage of your life when you will be happy to hear the phone is for you.

Thinking of that movie 'The Artist'; if anyone ever needed to reach anyone, I'm just thinking they didn't have cell phones, they didn't have Internet, they didn't have email, so I always wonder how it was back then where you had to be home if you needed to get a phone call; otherwise, people couldn't get a hold of you.

As a teenager you are at the last stage in your life when you will be happy to hear that the phone is for you.

I can go days without meaningful human interaction.

Technology is best when it brings people together.

Television is more interesting than people. If it were not we should have people standing in the corner of our room.

We have more and more ways to communicate, as Thoreau noted, but less and less to say.

There's all these ways to instantly communicate - cars, computers, telephone and transportation - and even with all that, it's so hard to find people and have an honest communication with them.

What did people do prior to cell phones? Read a book? If I'm stuck in a car, and I don't have my phone, I'm like, 'What am I doing?' Car rides used to be one of my favorite things.

Sometimes I think opposable thumbs were invented so teenage girls could use text messaging.

I never have anything to talk about.

I wanted to communicate and connect. I simply didn't seem able to do it.

Mourning the loss of the phone call is like pining for buggy driving or women in hats or three-martini lunches. They've gone.

Everything has become so easy. It's great that it's at your fingertips, but I miss those good old days. And we're connected, but it can be very alienating. There is this distance between all of us because we're speaking to each other through cameras and monitors and icons and Emojis.

Technology and communicating with people online or through a phone or through social media - it's a false sense of intimacy and connection.

I've played real people before, but I never knew them.

We have a million ways to get ahold of people, and we're the loneliest we've ever been.

I didn't have a phone there for about 10 years.

In an odd sort of way, the computer and the Internet is the hermit's ideal form of communication. You don't have to see anyone. To send an email, you don't have to talk to anyone. You can just send it, and they'll read it on their own. The Internet has been really good for hermits.

You played 'Snake' on it. That's what we had a cell phone for, when my mother would let us use it. When you had it, you set it down at the table, you set it down in the other room, we ate, and you enjoyed your time with your family.