Jennifer Egan Quotes

A song can take you to a special time in your life.

Music is just a huge part of my life. It affects moods. I've always found it insane how you can hear one song, and it takes you back to a specific, specific moment in your life, and you remember it vividly like it was yesterday.

One of the great things about music is that it has the capability of time travel - you smell a certain smell in the room and it takes you back to your childhood. I feel like music is able to do that, and it happens to me all the time.

Nostalgia has always been a key player in my songwriting cause within that space I find a great deal of inspiration.

That's the miracle of fiction. I use it to spray on certain moments or places from my youth.

I keep my scrapbooks in the car. When I come to a stoplight, I start looking through my past. Sometimes I wish the red lights were longer.

Let us say in the pocket of one of my old coats I find a movie ticket from many years ago. Once I see the ticket, not only do I remember that I saw this movie, but also scenes from this movie, which I think I have entirely forgotten, come back to me. Objects have this power, and I like it.

I like books that aren't just lovely but that have memories in themselves. Just like playing a song, picking up a book again that has memories can take you back to another place or another time.

I think listening to music from your youth is as powerful as a scent passed beneath your nose.

You never forget where you were when you write a song; it's a very proper memory, so I knew exactly where I was and what I was doing for each track. It was like going into a time machine.

Nothing connects to the moment like music. I count the music to bring me back, or more precisely, to bring her forward.

Can't repeat the past?" he cried incredulously. "Why of course you can!" He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.

A song marks an occasion in my life and that's how I live my life, by songs.

One may return to the place of his birth, He cannot go back to his youth.

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.

Music evokes so many feelings in us, memories, nostalgia, things that are connected to our past.

If you were falling in love and you could go back in time and relive a day and see the banal things you did that you'd forgotten about, you'd weep, looking at that day.

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.

I've got a good memory. Sometimes it's a curse. I remember what the light was like in the room the first time I heard Van Morrison's 'Moondance.'

When I sing, I always relive a part of my life.

My grandmother always used to wear this English perfume called Tuberose and then she died and then I dated this girl who wore the same thing. Every time I hung out with her, I could only think of my recently deceased grandmother. So sometimes a signature scent can be good and sometimes it can be bad.

I know I get a real kick, an emotional charge, out of playing a song I haven't played for 10 years. It just takes you back to that point in your life.

If you have children and want to give your future self a present, record their laughter as toddlers. When they're older and away from you, you might find that clip in the middle of the day, and it will transport you as surely as if you had a time machine.

We kind of look at music as something very natural in people's lives. I mean, most of us can relate to music in some sort of shape and form, and if you think about it, most of us remember the first time we kissed someone, what kind of music was playing or the song that was playing on our friend's birthday.

It's hard to remember my childhood without remembering music.