Jennifer Egan Quotes

I'm really lucky I'm still around. Everybody expected me to die next... But it was always someone else instead of me.

I didn't die young. So I am very lucky. There are other artists and people that didn't survive certain things... people can imagine that I did the most dangerous, and I did the worst... for many reasons, I shouldn't be here.

What people can survive and what they don't survive is shocking to me. Someone can go to Iraq and be blown to bits and survive. Someone can trip and fall on the street and they die - that's that.

If there's such a thing as somebody having nine lives, I guess I'm somewhat in that category.

I wouldn't go so far to say that destiny preserves me. I managed to survive and to succeed.

I know that I am a lucky guy. I know that after an accident like the one I had, you know, only one guy out of a thousand can really go back home and still live. And I am that one. So I am totally aware of that.

There's a lot of times when I shouldn't have been here. I go, 'Man, I'm blessed.' I've had people shoot at me and had all kinds of stuff happen, and somehow I'm still here, and other people are not.

Certain experiences you can't survive, and afterward you don't fully exist, even if you failed to die.

Even the losers get lucky sometimes!

It means you never know what's going to happen,' I said. 'You do your best, then take your chances. Everything else is beyond our control.

The only thing you have to worry about is bad luck. I never had bad luck.

There is no plan. All is hazard. And the only thing that will preserve us is ourselves.

She long ago accepted the fact that happiness is like, swallows in spring. It may come and nest under your eaves or it may not. You cannot command it.

Be a football to Time and Chance, the more kicks, the better, so that you inspect the whole game and know its utmost law.

Good luck, I'm beginning to discover, is just as baffling as the bad. There never seems to be a reason for it - no sense of reward or punishment. It simply is - the most incomprehensible idea of all.

Woe to him who would ascribe something like reason to Chance, and make a religion of surrendering to it.

What to do if you find yourself stuck in a crack in the ground underneath a giant boulder you can't move, with no hope of rescue. Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far, which given your current circumstances seems more likely, consider how lucky you are that it won't be troubling you much longer.

My father died when I was 10; my sister got polio a couple of years later and was paralyzed. So there I was - my sister in a wheel chair, my father gone, and my mother a quiet little mouse. You see, it was the '30s in the South, so my mother was not prepared to cope. So I was scared to death. And being that scared, everything afterward became a struggle not to go down the drain. Struggling became a way of life for me.

I've been lucky. I'll be lucky again.

Letters crossing in the post, unfamiliar tunes heard three times in one day, the way that blows of fate descend upon the same bowed shoulders, and the beams of good fortune glow perpetually upon the blessed. Fairy tales, as I said, are lived out daily. There is far more going on in the world than we ever imagine.

Nothing is going to happen to me, or you, for that matter. Anything can happen, though. Anything can happen. But most always, just normal things happen, and people have happy lives.

Everyone gets lucky once in a while, but no one is consistently lucky.

The world is the house of the strong. I shall not know until the end what I have lost or won in this place, in this vast gambling den where I have spent more than sixty years, dice box in hand, shaking the dice.

My childhood was quite extreme. Sometimes I was so weak I could not stand up. But now I am so strong. Life is unpredictable