Quotes from A Visit from the Goon Squad

“I'm always happy," Sasha said. "Sometimes I just forget.”
― Jennifer Egan, quote from A Visit from the Goon Squad

“I don’t want to fade away, I want to flame away - I want my death to be an attraction, a spectacle, a mystery. A work of art.”
― Jennifer Egan, quote from A Visit from the Goon Squad

“If I had a view like this to look down on every day, I would have the energy and inspiration to conquer the world. The trouble is, when you most need such a view, no one gives it to you.”
― Jennifer Egan, quote from A Visit from the Goon Squad

“The 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 from A Visit from the Goon Squad

“Like 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 from A Visit from the Goon Squad

“Sure, everything is ending," Jules said, "but not yet.”
― Jennifer Egan, quote from A Visit from the Goon Squad

“There's a fine line between thinking about somebody and thinking about not thinking about somebody, but I have the patience and the self-control to walk that line for hours - days, if I have to.”
― Jennifer Egan, quote from A Visit from the Goon Squad

“There are so many ways to go wrong. All we've got are metaphors, and they're never exactly right. You can never just Say. The. Thing.”
― Jennifer Egan, quote from A Visit from the Goon Squad

“Structural dissatisfaction: Returning to circumstances that once pleased you, after having experienced a more thrilling or opulent way of life, and finding that you can no longer tolerate them.”
― Jennifer Egan, quote from A Visit from the Goon Squad

“We stand there, quiet. My questions all seem wrong: How did you get so old? Was it all at once, in a day, or did you peter out bit by bit? When did you stop having parties? Did everyone else get old too, or was it just you? Are other people still here, hiding in the palm trees or holding their breath underwater? When did you last swim your laps? Do your bones hurt? Did you know this was coming and hide that you knew, or did it ambush you from behind?”
― Jennifer Egan, quote from A Visit from the Goon Squad

“Time’s a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?” Scotty shook his head. “The goon won.”
― Jennifer Egan, quote from A Visit from the Goon Squad

“I’m done. I’m old, I’m sad - that’s on a good day. I want out of this mess. But I don’t want to fade away, I want to flame away - I want my death to be an attraction, a spectacle, a mystery. A work of art.”
― Jennifer Egan, quote from A Visit from the Goon Squad

“Yet each disappointment Ted felt in his wife, each incremental deflation, was accompanied by a seizure of guilt; many years ago, he had taken the passion he felt for Susan and folded it in half, so he no longer had a drowning, helpless feeling when he glimpsed her beside him in bed: her ropy arms and soft, generous ass. Then he’d folded it in half again, so when he felt desire for Susan, it no longer brought with it an edgy terror of never being satisfied. Then in half again, so that feeling desire entailed no immediate need to act. Then in half again, so he hardly felt it. His desire was so small in the end that Ted could slip it inside his desk or a pocket and forget about it, and this gave him a feeling of safety and accomplishment, of having dismantled a perilous apparatus that might have crushed them both. Susan was baffled at first, then distraught; she’d hit him twice across the face; she’d run from the house in a thunderstorm and slept at a motel; she’d wrestled Ted to the bedroom floor in a pair of black crotchless underpants. But eventually a sort of amnesia had overtaken Susan; her rebellion and hurt had melted away, deliquesced into a sweet, eternal sunniness that was terrible in the way that life would be terrible, Ted supposed, without death to give it gravitas and shape. He’d presumed at first that her relentless cheer was mocking, another phase in her rebellion, until it came to him that Susan had forgotten how things were between them before Ted began to fold up his desire; she’d forgotten and was happy — had never not been happy — and while all of this bolstered his awe at the gymnastic adaptability of the human mind, it also made him feel that his wife had been brainwashed. By him.”
― Jennifer Egan, quote from A Visit from the Goon Squad

“Everybody sounds stoned, because they're e-mailing people the whole time they're talking to you.”
― Jennifer Egan, quote from A Visit from the Goon Squad

“I think, The world is actually huge. That's the part no one can really explain.”
― Jennifer Egan, quote from A Visit from the Goon Squad

“Her 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 from A Visit from the Goon Squad

“She 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 from A Visit from the Goon Squad

“Redemption, transformation--God how she wanted these things. Every day, every minute. Didn't everyone?”
― Jennifer Egan, quote from A Visit from the Goon Squad

“I felt no shame in these activities, because I understood what almost no one else seemed to grasp: that there was only an infinitesimal difference, a difference so small that it barely existed except as a figment of the human imagination, between working in a tall green glass building on Park Avenue and collecting litter in a park. In fact, there may have been no difference at all.”
― Jennifer Egan, quote from A Visit from the Goon Squad

“It 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 from A Visit from the Goon Squad

“Rich children are always blond, Jocelyn goes. It has to do with vitamins.”
― Jennifer Egan, quote from A Visit from the Goon Squad

“I can't tell if she's actually real, or if she's stopped caring if she's real or not. Or is not caring what makes a person real?”
― Jennifer Egan, quote from A Visit from the Goon Squad

“That we have some history together that hasn’t happened yet.”
― Jennifer Egan, quote from A Visit from the Goon Squad

“Rebecca was an academic star. Her new book was on the phenomenon of word casings, a term she'd invented for words that no longer had meaning outside quotation marks. English was full of these empty words--"friend" and "real" and "story" and "change"--words that had been shucked of their meanings and reduced to husks. Some, like "identity" and "search" and "cloud," had clearly been drained of life by their Web usage. With others, the reasons were more complex; how had "American" become an ironic term? How had "democracy" come to be used in an arch, mocking way?”
― Jennifer Egan, quote from A Visit from the Goon Squad

“See," Sasha muttered, eyeing the sun. "It's mine.”
― Jennifer Egan, quote from A Visit from the Goon Squad

“Everyone we've lost, we'll find. Or they'll find us.”
― Jennifer Egan, quote from A Visit from the Goon Squad

“You said you were a fairy princess
You said you were a shooting star
You said we'd go to Bora Bora
Now look at where the fuck we are”
― Jennifer Egan, quote from A Visit from the Goon Squad

“You kneel beside her, breathing the familiar smell of Sasha's sleep, whispering into her ear some mix of I'm sorry and I will never leave you, I'll be curled around your heart for the rest of your life, until the water pressing my shoulders and chest crushes me awake and I hear Sasha screaming into my face: Fight! Fight! Fight!”
― Jennifer Egan, quote from A Visit from the Goon Squad

“The world is full of shitheads, Rhea. Don’t listen to them—listen to me. And I know that Lou is one of those shitheads. But I listen.”
― Jennifer Egan, quote from A Visit from the Goon Squad

“th blu nyt
th stRs u can't c
th hum tht nevr gOs awy”
― Jennifer Egan, quote from A Visit from the Goon Squad

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“Ik begon te beseffen dat ik in een nachtmerrie zat toen het tot me doordrong dat ik niet wakker werd: dat alles echt gebeurde, hoe onmogelijk en ongelooflijk dat ook mocht zijn.”
― Dani Atkins, quote from Fractured

“As soon as he was out of sight, Gui pulled the macaron mixture towards him, and took a deep breath. He whipped it back and forth, beads of sweat springing on his forehead as his arm muscles released and contracted. When it was almost ready, he reached up for the shelf where the spices and colors were kept. Carefully, he brought down the bottle of 'creme de violette,' the jar of delicate, dried violets, their petals sparkling with sugar.
In tiny drops, he measured the purple liqueur into the mixture. He was acting on impulse, yet at the same time he felt certain, as though his first teacher, Monsieur Careme, was with him, guiding his steps. The scent reached up as he stirred, heady and sweet as a meadow, deep as lingering perfume in a midnight room. Hands shaking, he piped the mixture onto a tray in tiny rounds, enough to make six, one for each day that he and Jeanne would have to make it through before they could be together for the rest of their lives.
Maurice was delayed talking to Josef, and by the time he returned, Gui was putting the finishing touches to his creations, filling them with a vanilla cream from the cold room, balancing one, tiny, sugar-frosted violet flower upon each.”
― Laura Madeleine, quote from The Confectioner's Tale

“And following its path, we took no care
To rest, but climbed: he first, then I-- so far,
Through a round aperture I saw appear
Some of the beautiful things that Heaven bears,
Where we came forth, and once more saw the stars.”
― Dante Alighieri, quote from The Inferno

“You go out into your world, and try and find the things that will be useful to you. Your weapons. Your tools. Your charms. You find a record, or a poem, or a picture of a girl that you pin to the wall and go, "Her. I'll try and be her. I'll try and be her - but here." You observe the way others walk, and talk, and you steal little bits of them - you collage yourself out of whatever you can get your hands on. You are like the robot Johnny 5 in Short Circuit, crying, "More input! More input for Johnny 5! as you rifle through books and watch films and sit in front of the television, trying to guess which of these things that you are watching - Alexis Carrington Colby walking down a marble staircase; Anne of Green Gables holding her shoddy suitcase; Cathy wailing on the moors; Courtney Love wailing in her petticoat; Dorothy Parker gunning people down; Grace Jones singing "Slave to the Rhythm" - you will need when you get out there. What will be useful. What will be, eventually, you?

And you will be quite on your own when you do all this. There is no academy where you can learn to be yourself; there is no line manager slowly urging you toward the correct answer. You are midwife to yourself, and will give birth to yourself, over and over, in dark rooms, alone.

And some versions of you will end in dismal failure - many prototypes won't even get out the front door, as you suddenly realize that no, you can't style-out an all-in-one gold bodysuit and a massive attitude problem in Wolverhampton. Others will achieve temporary success - hitting new land-speed records, and amazing all around you, and then suddenly, unexpectedly exploding, like the Bluebird on Coniston Water.

But one day you'll find a version of you that will get you kissed, or befriended, or inspired, and you will make your notes accordingly, staying up all night to hone and improvise upon a tiny snatch of melody that worked.

Until - slowly, slowly - you make a viable version of you, one you can hum every day. You'll find the tiny, right piece of grit you can pearl around, until nature kicks in, and your shell will just quietly fill with magic, even while you're busy doing other things. What your nature began, nature will take over, and start completing, until you stop having to think about who you'll be entirely - as you're too busy doing, now. And ten years will pass without you even noticing.

And later, over a glass of wine - because you drink wine now, because you are grown - you will marvel over what you did. Marvel that, at the time, you kept so many secrets. Tried to keep the secret of yourself. Tried to metamorphose in the dark. The loud, drunken, fucking, eyeliner-smeared, laughing, cutting, panicking, unbearably present secret of yourself. When really you were about as secret as the moon. And as luminous, under all those clothes.”
― Caitlin Moran, quote from How to Build a Girl

“Finn fell asleep draped in Kittens and dreamed that the corn walked the earth on skinny white roots, liked to joke with the crows, and wasn't afraid of anything.”
― Laura Ruby, quote from Bone Gap

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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

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