Jennifer Egan Quotes

You can never predict what the specific shape of your life is going to be, and you won't really know its general shape until, God willing, you're advanced in years and you have the time and opportunity to look back in a coherent way and see what your life was about.

I want to be able to look back and think that as long as I was going this, I did the best that I could.

When you're in college, you really don't know where you're going to end up, but you know who you want to be along that journey.

I've had quite a life, when you stop and think about it.

I don't know how you get to be 40 without having a whole bunch of regrets.

When I write my autobiography after 20-25 years, I want 2014 to be the weakest year of my life.

I have a lot of things that I wish I had done differently given the opportunity to redo it but that would have changed everything, and I am very content with where I am today.

You can't really know where you are going until you know where you have been.

There are not many regrets that I have. There are a few things that I wish I'd changed in my life, but they are not so dramatic that I'd go out of my way to change them. But I go back and think about my life so far periodically in my head.

I have a lot of growing up to do. But I think, 'Hell, is it too late?'

I find my past in my present, and from these forecast my future.

Sometimes he thinks that if he could only trace the path of his life carefully enough, everything would become clear. The ways that he screwed up would make sense. He closes his eyes tightly. His life wasn't always a mistake, he thinks, and he breathes uncertainly for awhile, trying to find a pathway into unconsciousness, into sleep.

Life is strange. You keep moving and keep growing. Before you know it, you look back and think, "What was that?"

You look at where you're going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you've been and a pattern seems to emerge.

I think everyone has questions in their mind. Did they do their very best?

Sometimes life is so crazy, you have to go through something to be able to find out what you're supposed to talk about next, and I think that's what happened to me.

I couldn't change anything without changing the end position, and I'm perfectly happy now. So whatever I feel in some sense may have been a mistake in the past is, in another sense, not a mistake, because it's left me here.

I think you ought to be open-minded as to where life takes you.

When you're in the center of something, on a ride, I don't think you realize what it is until it's over.

Clip your year-end column and put it away for 10 years. See if you don’t feel like an idiot when you reread it.

Listen. Your life is happening. You are happening. Think back on your journey. The music of your life.

Sometimes we need to take back and take a look at ourselves, a look at where we are

Sometimes I have a feeling, when I look back on my life, that all I've been through has prepared me perfectly for just what I'm doing now.

It's strange, I think, the way our lives turn out. Moments of circumstance, when later combined with conscious decisions and actions and a boatload of hope, can eventually forge a future that seems predestined.

I never thought when I was a kid that I would become an adult. I never thought of myself as having any sort of distant horizon. I have sort of leapt without a master plan.