Jennifer Egan Quotes

When the chord of monotony is stretched to its tightest, it breaks with the sound of a song.

I never expected to record again. I knew I had done everything I ever wanted to do. I was satisfied. But... all the time I'm watching the country music horizon. And I'm sayin' 'Lord, is there anybody gonna come?'

Long intros are cool because there's a little bit of anticipation, you know?

In the theatre the audience wants to be surprised - but by things that they expect.

There's always a period of curious fear between the first sweet-smelling breeze and the time when the rain comes cracking down.

I'm probably the most excited about 'Turtleneck & Chain.'

Suspense is worse than disappointment.

In many cases your imagination is much more effective than what can be shown. It primes you to know something is about to happen - the anticipation and anxiety is worse than what ends up happening.

I definitely like the mystery of not knowing how things will turn out, you know.

This suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.

Wait and see.

When people come to a race, part of it is the anticipation: 'What is he going to do?'

I haven't a clue what's going to happen next, and I can't wait to find out.

I like when an audience doesn't know what's going to happen to a character, and I like when I don't know. I'm learning, too - I don't get the script, like, until the last day.

'Almost' is about uncertainty soon to be dismissed but not quite dispelled. 'Almost' is about revelation to come but not entirely promised.

I was petrified about 'I'm in You.' I couldn't wait to get it done to know whether it was good or not.

She reaches in, digs her hand deep into the ball, and pulls out a slip of paper. The crowd draws in a collective breath, and then you can hear a pin drop, and I'm feeling nauseous and so desperately hoping that it's not me, that it's not me, that it's not me. Effie Trinket crosses back to the podium, smoothes the slip of paper, and reads out the name in a clear voice. And it's not me. It's Primrose Everdeen.

No, what I felt was the torment of waiting, stuck between the end of one sentence and the beginning of the next which might or might not bring a hail storm, plane crash, poetic justice, or a miraculous reversal.

Nothing is exciting if you know what the outcome is going to be.

In our early youth we sit before the life that lies ahead of us like children sitting before the curtain in a theatre, in happy and tense anticipation of whatever is going to appear. Luckily we do not know what really will appear.

The suspense is terrible. I hope it'll last.

"Nothing ever happens like you imagine it will," she says. The sky is like a monochromatic contemporary painting, drawing me in with its illusion of depth, pulling me up. "Yeah, that's true," I say. But then after I think about it for a second, I add, "But then again, if you don't imagine, nothing ever happens at all."

The musical emotion springs precisely from the fact that at each moment the composer withholds or adds more or less than the listener anticipates on the basis of a pattern that he thinks he can guess, but that he is incapable of wholly divining. If the composer withholds more than we anticipate, we experience a delicious falling sensation; we feel we have been torn from a stable point on the musical ladder and thrust into the void. When the composer withholds less, the opposite occurs: he forces us to perform gymnastic exercises more skillful than our own.

She seemed to walk in an atmosphere of things about to happen.

As subjects, we all live in suspense, from day to day, from hour to hour; in other words, we are the hero of our own story. We cannot believe that it is finished, that we are 'finished,' even though we may say so; we expect another chapter, another installment, tomorrow or next week.