01c. 1962 ADIt was the hat. He looked sweet in the hat. How could a man in a fuzzy blue hat have used human bones to pave his roads?Jennifer Egan / quote ↗
02c. 1962 ADRich children are always blond, Jocelyn goes. It has to do with vitamins.Jennifer Egan / quote ↗
03c. 1962 ADWhen the clock stops on a life, all things emanating from it become precious, finite, and cordoned off for preservation. Each aspect of the dead person is removed from the flux of the everyday, which, of course, is where we miss him most. The quarantine around death makes it feel unlucky and wrong--a freakish incursion--and the dead, thus quarantined, come to seem more dead than they already are.... Borrowing from the dead is a way of keeping them engaged in life's daily transactions--in other words, alive.Jennifer Egan / quote ↗
04c. 1962 ADThat's what death is, Danny thought: wanting to talk to someone and not being able to.Jennifer Egan / quote ↗
05c. 1962 ADSo this is it ⎯ what cost me all that time. A man who turned out to be old, a house that turned out to be empty.Jennifer Egan / quote ↗
06c. 1962 ADLike all failed experiments, that one taught me something I didn’t expect: one key ingredient of so-called experience is the delusional faith that it is unique and special, that those included in it are privileged and those excluded from it are missing out.Jennifer Egan / quote ↗
07c. 1962 ADTime’s a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?” Scotty shook his head. “The goon won.Jennifer Egan / quote ↗
08c. 1962 ADI don't know what happened to me," he said, shaking his head. "I honestly don't." ... "You grew up, Alex.Jennifer Egan / quote ↗
10c. 1962 ADSoiled, forgotten coats of arms were carved above their massive doorways, and these unsettled Ted: such universal, defining symbols made meaningless by nothing more than time.Jennifer Egan / quote ↗
11c. 1962 ADI picture it like Judgement Day,' he says finally, his eyes on the water. 'We'll rise up out of our bodies and find each other again in spirit form. We'll meet in that new place, all of us together, and first it'll seem strange, and pretty soon it'll seem strange that you could ever lose someone, or get lost.Jennifer Egan / quote ↗
14c. 1962 ADToo Clear, too clean. The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was "digitization" which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh. Film, photography, music: dead. "An aesthetic holocaust!Jennifer Egan / quote ↗
15c. 1962 ADAnd it may be that a crowd at a particular moment of history creates the object to justify its gathering, as it did at the first Human Be-In and Monterey Pop and Woodstock. Or it may be that two generations of war and surveillance had left people craving the embodiment of their own unease in the form of a lone, unsteady man on a slide guitar.Jennifer Egan / quote ↗
16c. 1962 ADHer only thought was of getting away, as if she were carrying a live grenade from inside the house, so that when it exploded, it would destroy just herself.Jennifer Egan / quote ↗
17c. 1962 ADThe pause makes you think the song will end. And then the song isn't really over, so you're relieved. But then the song does actually end, because every song ends, obviously, and THAT. TIME. THE. END. IS. FOR. REAL.Jennifer Egan / quote ↗
18c. 1962 ADShe was clean": no piercings, tattoos, or scarifications. All the kids were now. And who could blame them, Alex thought, after watching three generations of flaccid tattoos droop like moth-eaten upholstery over poorly stuffed biceps and saggy asses?Jennifer Egan / quote ↗
19c. 1962 ADThis is the music business. 'Five years is five hundred years' - your words.Jennifer Egan / quote ↗
20c. 1962 ADAnd then I notice the music flooding out of every part of the apartment at once — the couch, the walls, even the floor — and I know Bennies alone in Lou’s studio, pouring music down around us. A minute ago it was “Don’t Let Me Down”. Then it was Blondie’s “Heart of Glass”. Now it’s Iggy Pop’s “The Passenger”. Listening, I think, You will never know how much I understand you.Jennifer Egan / quote ↗
21c. 1962 ADHe's rigged a tiny cassette player with a small set of foam earphones to listen to demo tapes and rough mixes. Occasionally he'll hand the device to Mindy, wanting her opinion, and each time, the experience of music pouring directly against her eardrums - hers alone - is a shock that makes her eyes well up; the privacy of it, the way it transforms her surroundings into a golden montage, as if she were looking back on this lark in Africa with Lou from some distant future.Jennifer Egan / quote ↗
22c. 1962 ADDas mine!' protested Ava, Bennie's daughter, affirming Alex's recent theory that language acquisition involved a phase of speaking German. She snatched a plastic skillet away from his own daughter, Cara-Ann, who lurched after it, roaring, 'Mine pot! Mine pot!Jennifer Egan / quote ↗
23c. 1962 ADSasha's green eyes were right up against yours, the lashes interlocking. "In Naples," she said, "there were kids who were just lost. You knew they were never going to get back to what they'd been, or have a normal life. And then there were other ones who you thought, maybe they will."...You opened your eyes, which you hadn't realized were shut again. "what I'm saying is, We're the survivors," Sasha said...."Not everyone is. But we are. Okay?Jennifer Egan / quote ↗
