Jennifer Egan Quotes

The scene I had just witnessed (a couple making love in the ocean) brought back a lot of memories – not of things I had done but of things I had failed to do, wasted hours and frustrated moments and opportunities forever lost because time had eaten so much of my life and I would never get it back. I envied Yeoman and felt sorry for myself at the same time, because I had seen him in a moment that made all my happiness seem dull.

... 'I've been doing everything for an awfully long time, and I've seen and lived as hard as I could, and it's been unbelievable, I tell you, unbelievable. But now I have the feeling everything's gliding away from me, and I don't remember, and I don't care, and yet now is right when I need it!'. [pp. 84-85]

There are many things that I feel I have missed out on.

It's so easy to get caught up in this weird life. This isn't normal and I'm not singing for people that live my life. I'm singing to the life I used to have. The life I want to have again.

I'm just fascinated by the past. You know, both by the possibilities it holds and by the complete tyranny of it, the way it sort of keeps you in this stranglehold and makes you want things that you no longer have and you can never get back.

When you are alone and too tired even to turn on any of your devices, you let yourself linger in a past stacked among your pillows.

And all the trips you know you missed And all the lips you never kissed Cut through you like a knife. And now you see stretched out before thee Just another story of a life.

Down the street the dogs are barking And the day is getting dark. As the night comes in a-falling, The dogs´ll lose their bark And the silent night will shatter From the sounds inside my mind, For I´m one to many mornings And a thousand miles behind. From the crossroads of my doorstep, My eyes they start to fade, As I turn my head back to the room Where my love and I have laid.

Sundown, yellow moon, I replay the past I know every scene by heart, they all went by so fast

In reviewing my life, in tracing its course, I fill my cell with the pleasure of being what for want of a trifle I failed to be, recapturing, so that I may hurl myself into them as into dark pits, those moments when I strayed through the trap-ridden compartments of a subterranean sky

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past, I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought.

The shadow-past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst. A biography of longing. It steers us like magnetism, a spirit torque. This is how one becomes undone by a smell, a word, a place, the photo of a mountain of shoes. By love that closes its mouth before calling a name.

In vain would I seek to discover Why sad and mournful am I, My thoughts without ceasing brood over A tale of the time gone by.

Ah, tell me not that memory sheds gladness o'er the past, what is recalled by faded flowers, save that they did not last?

We can't get our youth back.

Sharp nostalgia, infinite and terrible, for what I already possess.

I would trade everything I have to have had a happier childhood.

People look to you to replace a part in their lives that they can't get back. You can't get the past back, you can't do it. We've all tried.

Nothing prevents happiness like the memory of happiness.

I would have liked to have worked with Ralph Richardson and Paul Scofield, but they're dead now.

We are never happy; we can only remember that we were so once.

I exist only in the past.

Nostalgia is something we think of as fuzzy. But it's pain. Pain concerning the past.

I like to read my diary occasionally to remind myself what a miserable, alienated old sod I used to be.

Nostalgia is always doomed and dooming.