The Candy House Quotes

“But knowing everything is too much like knowing nothing; without a story, it’s all just information.”
― Jennifer Egan, The Candy House

“Nothing is free! Only children expect otherwise even as myths and fairy tales warn us: Rumpelstiltskin, King Midas, Handsel and Gretel. Never trust a candy house! It was only a matter of time before someone made them pay for what they thought they were getting for free.”
― Jennifer Egan, The Candy House

“Mysteries that are destroyed by measurement were never truly mysterious; only our ignorance made them seem so.”
― Jennifer Egan, The Candy House

“The need for personal glory is like cigarette addiction: a habit that feels life-sustaining even as it kills you.”
― Jennifer Egan, The Candy House

“I understood with sudden clarity that doing the right thing - being right - gets you nothing in this world. It's the sinners everyone loves: the flailers, the scramblers, the bumblers. There was nothing sexy about getting it right the first time.”
― Jennifer Egan, The Candy House

“There is nothing original about human behavior. Any idea I have is likely occurring to scores of others in my demographic categories. We live in similar ways, think similar thoughts. What the eluders want to restore, I suspect, is the uniqueness they felt before counting like ours revealed that they were an awful lot like everyone else. But where the eluders have it wrong is that quantifiability doesn’t make human life any less remarkable, or even (this is counterintuitive, I know) less mysterious—any more than identifying the rhyme scheme in a poem devalues the poem itself. The opposite! Mysteries that are destroyed by measurement were never truly mysterious; only our ignorance made them seem so. They are like whodunits after you know who did it. Does anyone reread a murder mystery? Whereas the cosmos has been mysterious to humans since long before we knew anything about astronomy or space—and, now that we do, is only more so.”
― Jennifer Egan, The Candy House

“A new remote and unfamiliar place can make the prior remote and unfamiliar place seem like home.”
― Jennifer Egan, The Candy House

“One horror of motherhood lies in the moments when she can see both the exquisiteness of her child and his utter inconsequence to others.”
― Jennifer Egan, The Candy House

“friendship risks the end of friendship,”
― Jennifer Egan, The Candy House

“He felt the mystery of his own unconscious like a whale looming invisibly beneath a tiny swimmer. If he couldn't search or retrieve or view his own past, then it wasn't really his. It was lost.”
― Jennifer Egan, The Candy House

“To hell with God,” Fern said. “I’m worried about the Internet.” “By which you mean an all-seeing, all-knowing entity that may be predicting and controlling your behavior, even when you think you’re choosing for yourself?”
― Jennifer Egan, The Candy House

“The fact that so many thoughts could have gone through my head in 3.36 seconds is testament to the infinitude of an individual consciousness. There is no end to it, no way to measure it. Consciousness is like the cosmos multiplied by the number of people alive in the world (assuming that consciousness dies when we do, and it may not) because each of our minds is a cosmos of its own: unknowable, even to ourselves.”
― Jennifer Egan, The Candy House

“People rarely look the way you expect them to, even when you’ve seen pictures. The first thirty seconds in a person’s presence are the most important. If you’re having trouble perceiving and projecting, focus on projecting.”
― Jennifer Egan, The Candy House

“Social media was dead, everyone agreed; self-representations were inherently narcissistic or propagandic or both, and grossly inauthentic.”
― Jennifer Egan, The Candy House

“Nowadays, a man ill at ease in his surroundings will pull out his phone, request the Wi-Fi password, and rejoin a virtual sphere where his identity is instantly reaffirmed. Let us all take a moment to consider deeply what isolation was customary before these times arrived!”
― Jennifer Egan, The Candy House

“Tongue-in-cheek nostalgia is merely the portal, the candy house, if you will, through which we hope to lure in a new generation and bewitch them.”
― Jennifer Egan, The Candy House

“Susan was haunted by the gap between the sensation of three boys climbing her torso like a tree, combing sticky fingers through her hair, muttering into her ears—and the constraint of adulthood: How are you, honey? You look a little tired. Is there anything I can do? How about a hug for your old mom? If she’d had an inkling, back then, of the ache this constraint would cause her, she would never—not once!—have said, “Let go of me, boys, I just need a minute,” and shaken them off. She would have held still and let them pick her clean, understanding that there would be nothing better to save herself for.”
― Jennifer Egan, The Candy House

“I see now that the place I’ve been yearning for is my own imagination.”
― Jennifer Egan, The Candy House

“but I didn’t want to leave without telling you, Molly, and I’m nothing short of amazed by her kindness, this is not something you see in my world, kindness and coolness do not go together in girls, being cool means you leave people out, that is the actual definition of the word because if you’re nice to everyone, then why should people near you feel special and why should people NOT near you WANT to be near you, and why should anyone assume that the Times they are having without you are worse than the Times they would be having with you?”
― Jennifer Egan, The Candy House

“they’ll all divorce—everyone will divorce. An entire generation will throw off the fetters of rote commitment in favor of invention, hope—and we, their children, will try to locate the moment we lost them and worry that it was our fault.”
― Jennifer Egan, The Candy House

“Only his folks altered with the years, their hair going silver, Robert Sr., a high school football coach , ultimately on oxygen for emphysema, both of them seeming to shrink on the couch cushions in a way that made the crystal and porcelain artifacts look bigger each year.”
― Jennifer Egan, The Candy House

“Your mind will rejoin your body when it is safe to do so.”
― Jennifer Egan, The Candy House

“Making her mark ended up not involving any of the things she’d banked on—her dancing, her beauty, her sexual confidence—in fact, all of those succumbed to it. Heroin is her great love, her life’s work, and she has given up everything for it, through renunciation or sheer neglect.”
― Jennifer Egan, The Candy House

“If my life has taught me anything, it’s that curiosity and expediency have a sneaky, inexorable power. Resisting them is easy for a minute—a hundred minutes—even a year. But not forever.”
― Jennifer Egan, The Candy House

“A smile is a door that is both open and closed.”
― Jennifer Egan, The Candy House

“I’m itching to get to my medical clinic, where there’s always more to do and it always matters. But I’ve learned to resist that impulse. Years ago, when Sasha and I were struggling with Lincoln, my habit of “fleeing” to my clinic almost cost me my marriage. Since then, I’ve subjected my impulses to leave for work to a three-step protocol: 1) Is it necessary that I go at this moment? 2) Is there something at home that I want to avoid? 3) Will I be letting anyone down by leaving right now?”
― Jennifer Egan, The Candy House

“There is nothing original about human behavior.”
― Jennifer Egan, The Candy House

“Alone by choice on Saturday nights, writing by an open window in his studio apartment, Gregory had experienced a kind of euphoria: a swelling, bursting, yearning hunger that had something in common with lust but included everyone, from the revelers outside his window to the carousers down the hall. He was where he wanted to be, and needed nothing else.”
― Jennifer Egan, The Candy House

“Already midcareer, Ted published Van Gogh, Painter of Sound, which found correlations between Van Gogh’s types of brushstroke and the proximity of noisemaking creatures like cicadas, bees, crickets, and woodpeckers—whose microscopic traces had been detected in the paint itself.”
― Jennifer Egan, The Candy House

“In frantic league, we flailed for ways to end the “sharing” that was dismantling our father’s business and our father. We contemplated a nationwide billboard campaign to remind people of that eternal law, Nothing is free! Only children expect otherwise, even as myths and fairy tales warn us: Rumpelstiltskin, King Midas, Hansel and Gretel. Never trust a candy house! It was only a matter of time before someone made them pay for what they thought they were getting for free. Why could nobody see this?”
― Jennifer Egan, The Candy House