Top 100 Jonathan Franzen Quotes
#1. As if sustained and too-direct contact with time's raw passage could scar the nerves permanently, like staring at the sun.
Jonathan Franzen
#2. Hell-o-oh," she called with the silly lilt with which she and Tom announced arrivals. "Hello," Tom called from the living room, without the lilt.
Jonathan Franzen
#3. The problem with a life freely chosen every day, a New Testament life, was that it could end at any moment.
Jonathan Franzen
#4. With whiskey, the capillary bloom was more diffusely rosy than with gin and less purple than with wine. Every university dinner party was a study in blooms.
Jonathan Franzen
#5. Robin turned and looked straight into her. "What's life for?"
"I don't know."
"I don't either. But I don't think it's about winning.
Jonathan Franzen
#6. There's hardly anybody who doesn't hate somebody now, and nobody at all whom somebody doesn't hate.
Jonathan Franzen
#7. How, by the logic of addiction, could we not have proceeded to the needle and the vein?
Jonathan Franzen
#8. And Pip wanted to do good, if only for lack of better ambitions.
Jonathan Franzen
#9. To have an identity, you have to believe that other identities equally exist. You need closeness with other people. And how is closeness built? By sharing secrets.
Jonathan Franzen
#10. I was about 13, in some ways, when I wrote the first book. Approximately 18 when I wrote the second.
Jonathan Franzen
#11. It was better to be angry than to be hurt; maybe even better than being loved and held by him, because maybe anger was what she'd been feeling toward him all along, anger disguised as wanting.
Jonathan Franzen
#12. This wasn't the person he'd thought he was, or would have chosen to be if he'd been free to choose, but there was something comforting and liberating about being an actual definite someone, rather than a collection of contradictory potential someones.
Jonathan Franzen
#13. Everything he did was at least partial and often total bullshit (402).
Jonathan Franzen
#14. But nothing disturbs the feeling of specialness like the presence of other human beings feeling identically special.
Jonathan Franzen
#15. Not only had Mr. Butcavage's questions been reasonable, he also had an unfortunate name and no friends in his neighborhood. He was probably a lonely person like her mother, and Pip felt helplessly compassionate toward anyone who reminded her of her mother.
Jonathan Franzen
#16. The one thing everyone in the Republic had plenty of was time. Whatever you didn't do today really could be put off until tomorrow.
Jonathan Franzen
#17. The only decoration on the gray segments of her cubicle was a bumper sticker, AT LEAST THE WAR ON THE ENVIRONMENT IS GOING WELL. Her colleagues' cubicles were covered with photos
Jonathan Franzen
#18. Deploring other people
their lack of perfection
had always been our sport.
Jonathan Franzen
#19. I think the mission for the writer is to tell stories in a compelling way about the stuff that cannot be talked about, that cannot be gotten at with shallow media.
Jonathan Franzen
#20. And this of course, was the simplest definition of depression that he knew of: strongly disliking yourself.
Jonathan Franzen
#21. Expecting a novel to bear the weight of our whole disturbed society - to help solve our contemporary problems - seems to me a peculiarly American delusion. To write sentences of such authenticity that refuge can be taken in them: isn't this enough? Isn't it a lot?
Jonathan Franzen
#22. I was a late child from my parents, so I grew up surrounded by people a lot older than me. I think even when I was 21, I felt like I was a 70-year-old man.
Jonathan Franzen
#24. If you substituted networks for socialism, you got the Internet. Its competing platforms were united in their ambition to define every term of your existence.
Jonathan Franzen
#25. And if you sat at the dinner table long enough, whether in punishment or in refusal or simply in boredom, you never stopped sitting there. Some part of you sat there all your life.
Jonathan Franzen
#26. The cold breeze and the cold of Richard's Camel were mixing like joy and remorse.
Jonathan Franzen
#27. Is this irony, hypocrisy, or a contradiction? I'm never sure which term is appropriate." "Call it all three if you want," Andreas said. "Chutzpah. That's a fourth term.
Jonathan Franzen
#28. You need closeness with other people. And how is closeness built? By sharing secrets. Colleen
Jonathan Franzen
#29. As one anthropologist pointed out to me, trauma is usually a group experience, so trauma recovery should be a group experience as well. But in our society it's not.
Jonathan Franzen
#30. Well, and that's what really counts, isn't it? I've become one of those women who put a ton of work into looking OK. If I can just go on and make a beautiful corpse, I'll have the whole problem pretty well licked.
Jonathan Franzen
#31. How wrong to have been so negative, how wrong to have been so gloomy, how wrong to have run away from life, how wrong to have said no, again and again, instead of yes.
Jonathan Franzen
#32. It's like having one red sock in a load of white laundry. One red sock, and nothing is ever white again.
Jonathan Franzen
#33. Since a person couldn't exist in two places at once, the more he existed as the Internet's image of him, the less he felt like he existed as a flesh-and-blood person.
Jonathan Franzen
#34. Ever since he'd discovered a secret passageway out of self-alienation, in the form of giving himself pleasure while also receiving it, he'd increasingly resented any activity that took him away from it.
Jonathan Franzen
#35. What lived on-in me- was the discomfort of how completely I'd outgrown the novel I'd once been so happy to live in
Jonathan Franzen
#36. Don't talk to me about hatred if you haven't been married.
Jonathan Franzen
#37. She had all day every day to figure out some decent and satisfying way to live, and yet all she ever seemed to get for all her choices and all her freedom was more miserable. The autobiographer is almost forced to the conclusion that she pitied herself for being so free.
Jonathan Franzen
#38. I used to think it was hard to write, and I still find the process more or less unpleasant, but if I know what I'm doing it rattles along, then the rewrite whips it into shape rather quickly.
Jonathan Franzen
#39. So, what, you got cigarette burns, too?" Gitanes said. Chip showed his palm, "It's nothing." "Self-inflicted. You pathetic American." "Different kind of prison" Chip said.
Jonathan Franzen
#42. Every good writer I know needs to go into some deep, quiet place to do work that is fully imagined. And what the Internet brings is lots of vulgar data. It is the antithesis of the imagination. It leaves nothing to the imagination.
Jonathan Franzen
#43. The ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne, is to replace a natural world that's indifferent to our wishes - a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance - with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self.
Jonathan Franzen
#44. 's one of the perversities of the age: I'm embarrassed by its success, but I'm happy it's selling.
Jonathan Franzen
#45. Twitter is unspeakably irritating. Twitter stands for everything I oppose,
Jonathan Franzen
#46. Integrity's a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They're pure hyena.
Jonathan Franzen
#47. Fiction, I believed, was the transmutation of experiential dross into linguistic gold. Fiction meant taking up whatever the world had abandoned by the road and making something beautiful out of it.
Jonathan Franzen
#48. He had shining dark eyes and an oboe voice and mink-soft hair and could seem, even to Gary, more sentient animal than little boy.
Jonathan Franzen
#49. Even then, when the hike was perfect, I would wonder, 'Now what?' And take a picture. Take another picture. Like a man with a photogenic girlfriend he didn't love.
Jonathan Franzen
#51. When I finally gave up any hope of doing anything representative of the American family, I actually seemed to have tapped into other people's weirdness in that way.
Jonathan Franzen
#52. He had a happy canine way of seeking approval without seeming insecure.
Jonathan Franzen
#53. The tone of the new ones, in their TED Talks, in PowerPointed product launches, in testimony to parliaments and congresses, in utopianly titled books, was a smarmy syrup of convenient conviction and personal surrender that he remembered well from the Republic. He
Jonathan Franzen
#54. Not just the industrial farming but the sprawl, the sprawl, the sprawl. Low-density development is the worst. And SUVs everywhere, snowmobiles everywhere, Jet Skis everywhere, ATVs everywhere, two-acre lawns everywhere. The goddamned green monospecific chemical-drenched lawns.
Jonathan Franzen
#55. Gary had hoped to find her more cooperative. He already had one "alternative" sibling and he didn't need another. It frustrated him that people could so happily drop out of the world of conventional expectations; it felt like a unilateral rewriting, to his disadvantage, of the rules of life.
Jonathan Franzen
#56. But what do we expect will become of students, successfully cocooned from uncomfortable feelings, once they leave the sanctuary of academe for the boorish badlands of real life?
Jonathan Franzen
#57. Nowadays there is really only one habit of highly effective people: Don't fall behind with email.
Jonathan Franzen
#58. The main form of family interaction was playing cards and board games, at which it was assumed that everyone was trying to cheat.
Jonathan Franzen
#59. He knows how love blinds people to the truth about the one they are in love with.
Jonathan Franzen
#60. He was so immersed and implicated in the Internet, so enmeshed in its totalitarianism, that his online existence was coming to seem realer than his physical self.
Jonathan Franzen
#62. [Patty's] Copernican wish to the be sun around which all things revolved
Jonathan Franzen
#63. Then she waited, with parted lips and a saucy challenge in her eyes, to see how her presence
the drama of being her
was registering. In the way of such chicks, she seemed convinced of the originality of her provocation.
Jonathan Franzen
#64. It rankled her that people richer than she were so often less worthy and attractive. More slobbish and louty. Comfort could be found in being poorer than people who were smart and beautiful. But to be less affluent than these T-shirted, joke-cracking fatsos-
Jonathan Franzen
#65. [T]hat I could find company and consolation and hope in an object pulled almost at random from a bookshelf
felt akin to an instance of religious grace.
Jonathan Franzen
#66. Success at sports is the province of the almost empty head.
Jonathan Franzen
#67. He operated by Old World rules, the blurring of right and wrong into whatever you could get away with;
Jonathan Franzen
#68. Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people.
Jonathan Franzen
#69. Only silence was acceptable in its potential to be endless.
Jonathan Franzen
#70. Nell Zink is a writer of extraordinary talent and range. Her work insistently raises the possibility that the world is larger and stranger than the world you think you know.
Jonathan Franzen
#71. Respectless and depraved, maybe. But happily respectless, happily depraved.
Jonathan Franzen
#72. To me, the point of a novel is to take you to a still place. You can multitask with a lot of things, but you can't really multitask reading a book.
Jonathan Franzen
#74. I was very young, and so I know," my mother said. "I know what can happen." "We're not you," Anabel said. "That's what everyone thinks," my mother said. "They think they're not like other people. But then life teaches you some lessons.
Jonathan Franzen
#75. Dogs again had it right. They didn't trouble themselves with mysteries that could never be solved anyway.
Jonathan Franzen
#76. She told herself a story about a daughter in a family so hungry for a daughter that it would have eaten her alive if she hadn't run away.
Jonathan Franzen
#78. Once upon a time, it had sufficed to write 'The Sound and the Fury' or 'The Sun Also Rises.' But now bigness was essential. Thickness, length.
Jonathan Franzen
#79. I'm starting to think paradise isn't eternal contentment. It's more like there's something eternal about feeling contented. There's no such thing as eternal life, because you're never going to outrun time, but you can still escape time if you're contented, because then time doesn't matter.
Jonathan Franzen
#81. I wrote two plotted books, got some of the fundamentals of storytelling down, then ... it's sort of like taking the training wheels off, trying to write a book that's fun in the same way without relying on quite such mechanical or external beats.
Jonathan Franzen
#82. because, no matter how he'd come to hate her, he was also, even now, trying to impress her and win her praise, bringing her his Bertrand Russell papers as mother-flattering evidence of his outsize intellect, constructing his rhyme schemes.
Jonathan Franzen
#83. The first thing that reading teaches us is how to be alone.
Jonathan Franzen
#84. The weekly thirty minutes of sexual stress was a chronic but low-grade discomfort, like the humidity in Florida
Jonathan Franzen
#85. He didn't understand what happened to him. He felt like a piece of paper that had once had coherent writing on it but had been through the wash. He felt roughened, bleached, and worn out along the fold lines.
Jonathan Franzen
#86. The lump in his throat was evidence of how much, in spite of everything, he still loved her.
Jonathan Franzen
#87. She was so much a personality and so little anything else that even staring straight at her he had no idea what she really looked like.
Jonathan Franzen
#88. So many Jonathans. A plague of literary Jonathans. If you read only the New York Times Book Review, you'd think it was the most common male name in America. Synonymous with talent, greatness. Ambition, vitality.
Jonathan Franzen
#89. The rage inside him was titanic. How to keep from exploding? What a relief exploding was.
Jonathan Franzen
#90. There was, of course, nowhere better in the world to be than New York City. This fact was the foundation of her family's satisfaction with itself, the platform from which all else could be ridiculed, the collateral of adult sophistication that bought them the right to behave like children.
Jonathan Franzen
#91. Although he, like all people, secretely enjoyed the smell of his own farts, the smell of his shit was somethig else. It was so bad as to seem evil in a moral way.
Jonathan Franzen
#92. And maybe this was what craziness was: an emergency valve to relieve the pressure of unbearable anxiety.
Jonathan Franzen
#93. You know you'd rather read about me than experience me in person. Why pretend?
Jonathan Franzen
#94. It's nice to be able to control my smell environment, and I can hear myself think better when it's quiet. It wasn't easy to become a person who's OK being alone on a Saturday night, but I did the work, I got there...
Jonathan Franzen
#95. Her very difficulty created friction, and friction led to satisfaction ...
Jonathan Franzen
#96. Life a miserable contradiction, endless desire but limited supplies, your birth just a ticket to your death:
Jonathan Franzen
#97. The Mekons were kind of like the background music of my life.
Jonathan Franzen
#98. [H]er mind was like a balloon with static cling, attracting random ideas as they floated by[.]
Jonathan Franzen
#99. It's healthy to say uncle when your bone's about to break.
Jonathan Franzen
#100. I guess my life hasn't always been happy, or easy, or exactly what I want. At a certain point, I just have to try not to think too much about certain things, or else they'll break my heart.
Jonathan Franzen
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