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Top Jonathan Franzen Quotes

Browse top 156 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Jonathan Franzen.

Favorite Jonathan Franzen Quotes

1. "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
2. "Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular. But the realism is merely a mask for depression's actual essence, which is an overwhelming estrangement from humanity. The more persuaded you are of your unique access to the rottenness, the more afraid you become of engaging with the world; and the less you engage with the world, the more perfidiously happy-faced the rest of humanity seems for continuing to engage with it." ~ Jonathan Franzen
3. "It took hours to turn the clock back 30 seconds." ~ Jonathan Franzen
4. "Washington's all abstraction. It's about access to power and nothing else. I mean, I'm sure it's fun if you're living next door to Seinfeld, or To Wolfe, or Mike Bloomberg, but living next door to them isn't what New York is about, In Washington people literally talk about how many feet away from John Kerry's house their own house is. The neighborhoods are all so blah, the only thing that turns people on is proximity to power. It's a total fetish culture. People get this kind of orgasmic shiver when they tell you they sat next to Paul Wolfowitz at a conference or got invited to Grover Norquist's breakfast." ~ Jonathan Franzen
5. "Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people." ~ Jonathan Franzen
6. "The pain was quite extraordinary. And yet also weirdly welcome and restorative, bringing him news of his aliveness and his caughtness in a story larger than himself." ~ Jonathan Franzen
7. "[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
8. "He watched a catbird hopping around in an azalea that was readying itself to bloom; he envied the bird for knowing nothing of what he knew; he would have swapped souls with it in a heartbeat. And then to take wing, to know the air's buoyancy even for an hour: the trad was a no-brainer, and the catbird, with its lively indifference to him, its sureness of physical selfhood, seemed well aware of how preferable it was to be the bird." ~ Jonathan Franzen
9. "Our visual cortexes are wired to quickly recognize faces and then quickly subtract massive amounts of detail from them, zeroing in on their essential message: Is this person happy? Angry? Fearful? Individual faces may vary greatly, but a smirk on one is a lot like a smirk on another. Smirks are conceptual, not pictorial. Our brains are like cartoonists - and cartoonists are like our brains, simplifying and exaggerating, subordinating facial detail to abstract comic concepts." ~ Jonathan Franzen
10. "And if the world refused to square with his version of reality then it was necessarily an uncaring world, a sour and sickening world, a penal colony, and he was doomed to be violently lonely in it. He bowed his head at the thought of how much strength a man would need to survive an entire life so lonely." ~ Jonathan Franzen
11. "How could I have thought that I needed to cure myself in order to fit into the 'real' world? I didn't need curing, and the world didn't, either; the only thing that did need curing was my understanding of my place in it. Without that understanding - without a sense of belonging to the real world - it was impossible to thrive in an imagined one." ~ Jonathan Franzen
12. "He couldn't figure out if she was immensely well adjusted or seriously messed up." ~ Jonathan Franzen
13. "For every reader who dies today, a viewer is born, and we seem to be witnessing . . . the final tipping balance." ~ Jonathan Franzen
14. "Each new thing he encountered in life impelled him in a direction that fully convinced him of its rightness, but then the next new thing loomed up and impelled him in the opposite direction, which also felt right. There was no controlling narrative: he seemed to himself a purely reactive pinball in a game whose only object was to stay alive for staying alive's sake." ~ Jonathan Franzen
15. "Life, in her experience, had a kind of velvet luster. You looked at yourself from one perspective and all you saw was weirdness. Move your head a little bit, though, and everything looked reasonably normal." ~ Jonathan Franzen
16. "Patty knew, in her heart, that he was wrong in his impression of her. And the mistake she went to go on to make, the really big life mistake, was to go along with Walter's version of her in spite of knowing that it wasn't right. He seemed so certain of her goodness that eventually he wore her down." ~ Jonathan Franzen
17. "Use well thy freedom." ~ Jonathan Franzen
18. "He had a happy canine way of seeking approval without seeming insecure." ~ Jonathan Franzen
19. "Everything he'd done with regard to her in the last three years had been calculated to foreclose the intensely personal sort of talks they'd had when he was younger: to get her to shut up, to train her to contain herself, to make her stop pestering him with her overfull heart and her uncensored self. And now that the training was complete and she was obediently trivial with him, he felt bereft of her and wanted to undo it." ~ Jonathan Franzen
20. "Oh, misanthropy and sourness. Gary wanted to enjoy being a man of wealth and leisure, but the country was making it none too easy. All around him, millions of newly minted American millionaires were engaged in the identical pursuit of feeling extraordinary - of buying the perfect Victorian, of skiing the virgin slope, of knowing the chef personally, of locating the beach that had no footprints. There were further tens of millions of young Americans who didn't have money but were nonetheless chasing the Perfect Cool. And meanwhile the sad truth was that not everyone could be extraordinary, not everyone could be extremely cool; because whom would this leave to be ordinary? Who would perform the thankless work of being comparatively uncool?" ~ Jonathan Franzen
21. "I had a Viking sense of entitlement to whatever provisions I could plunder." ~ Jonathan Franzen
22. "What he'd never understood about men in his position, in all the books he'd read and movies he'd seen about them, was clearer to him now: you couldn't keep expecting wholehearted love without, at some point, requiting it. There was no credit to be earned for simply being good." ~ Jonathan Franzen
23. "This evening I begin a notebook. If anyone reads this, I trust they will forgive my overuse of "I". I can't stop it. I'm writing this." ~ Jonathan Franzen
24. "Birds were like dinosaurs' better selves. They had short lives and long summers. We all should be so lucky as to leave behind such heirs." ~ Jonathan Franzen
25. "Sounded to me like he had a pretty good idea what he was saying," Van replied, with surprisingly little anger. "It's a pity he had to overintellectualize like that. He did such good work, and then he had to go and intellectualize it." ~ Jonathan Franzen
26. "The more you pursue distractions, the less effective any particular distraction is, and so I'd had to up various dosages, until, before I knew it, I was checking my e-mail every ten minutes, and my plugs of tobacco were getting ever larger, and my two drinks a night had worsened to four, and I'd achieved such deep mastery of computer solitaire that my goal was no longer to win a game but to win two or more games in a row--a kind of meta-solitaire whose fascination consisted not in playing the cards but in surfing the streaks of wins and losses." ~ Jonathan Franzen
27. "The fundamental fact about all of us is that we're alive for a while but will die before long. This fact is the real root cause of all our anger and pain and despair. And you can either run from this fact or, by way of love, you can embrace it." ~ Jonathan Franzen
28. "When the sex is persuasively rendered, it tends to read autobiographically, and there are limits to my desire for immersion in a stranger's biochemistry." ~ Jonathan Franzen
29. "Every February, (Charles)Shultz drew a strip about Charlie Brown's failure to get any valentines. Schroeder, in one installment, chides Violet for trying to fob off a discarded valentine on Charlie Brown several days after Valentine's Day, and Charlie Brown shoves Schroeder aside with the words "Don't interfere--I'll take it!" But the story Schulz told about his own childhood experience with valentines was very different. When he was in first grade, he said, his mother helped him make a valentine for each of his classmates, so that nobody would be offended by not getting one, but he felt too shy to put them in the box at the front of the classroom, and so he took them all home again to his mother." ~ Jonathan Franzen
30. "Terwijl hij wachtte tot het trillen minder werd - terwijl hij machteloos keek naar de rukkerige, maaiende bewegingen, alsof hij in een kinderkamer vol krijsende, zich misdragende peuters zat en zijn stem kwijt was en ze niet tot bedaren kon brengen - vermaakte Alfred zich ermee zich voor te stellen dat hij zijn hand afhakte met een bijl: dat hij het ongehoorzame lichaamsdeel duidelijk maakte hoe vreselijk boos hij erop was, hoe weinig hij ervan hield als het hem niet wilde gehoorzamen. Het leidde tot een soort extase als hij zich voorstelde hoe het blad van de bijl de eerste keer in het bot en de spieren van zijn ergerlijke pols hakte; maar tegelijk met de extase, ermee samengaand, was er een neiging om te wenen om die hand die van hem was, waar hij van hield en die hij het beste toewenste, die hij zijn hele leven al kende.61" ~ Jonathan Franzen
31. "[Patty's] Copernican wish to the be sun around which all things revolved" ~ Jonathan Franzen
32. "D'où venait l'apitoiement sur soi ? Cette quantité extraordinaire d'apitoiement sur soi ? Selon presque tous les critères possibles, elle menait une vie très heureuse. Elle avait toutes ses journées pour penser à une façon décente et satisfaisante de vivre, et pourtant tout ce qu'elle semblait récolter avec tous ses choix et toute sa liberté, c'était de plus en plus de malheur. Du coup, l'autobiographie en arrive presque à la conclusion qu'elle se lamentait d'avoir autant de liberté. (p. 262)" ~ Jonathan Franzen
33. "Then again, there had always been something not quite right about the Berglunds." ~ Jonathan Franzen
34. "Gary si augurava che ogni ulteriore migrazione verso le coste venisse proibita, e tutti gli abitanti del Midwest fossero incoraggiati a tornare ai cibi pesanti, agli abiti fuori moda e ai giochi di società, in modo da mantenere una riserva nazionale strategica di idiozia" ~ Jonathan Franzen
35. "Whether anybody was home meant everything to a house. It was more than a major fact: it was the only fact.The family was the house's soul." ~ Jonathan Franzen
36. "It was this other side of Avery - the fact that he so visibly had an other side - that was helping me finally understand all three of the dimensions in Kafka: that a man could be a sweet, sympathetic, comically needy victim and a lascivious, self-aggrandizing, grudge-bearing bore, and also, crucially, a third thing: a flickering consciousness, a simultaneity of culpable urge and poignant self-reproach, a person in process." ~ Jonathan Franzen
37. "When I see an actress or actor drag deeply in a movie, I imagine the pyrenes and phenols ravaging the tender epithelial cells and hardworking cilia of their bronchi, the monoxide and cyanide binding to their hemoglobin, the heaving and straining of their chemically panicked hearts." ~ Jonathan Franzen
38. "Cooks were the mitochondria of humanity; they had their own separate DNA, they floated in a cell and powered it but were not really of it." ~ Jonathan Franzen
39. "Patty começou a chorar por motivos que se sentia triste demais para examinar." ~ Jonathan Franzen
40. "La brezza fredda e il fumo della Camel si mescolavano come gioia e rimorso." ~ Jonathan Franzen
41. "Laat op de avond, als het verkeer op de snelweg eindelijk bedaarde, leken de dennen achter het woonhuis waarachtig te fluisteren." ~ Jonathan Franzen
42. "A candle is like a small sun, but the sun is like a large candle; examined closely, language turns out to operate through the lateral associations of metaphor, rather than through the vertical identifications of naming." ~ Jonathan Franzen
43. "Edith Wharton did have one potentially redeeming disadvantage: she wasn't pretty." ~ Jonathan Franzen
44. "a paroxysm of cumulative revulsion" ~ Jonathan Franzen
45. "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
46. "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
47. "Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan." ~ Jonathan Franzen
48. "Without privacy there was no point in being an individual." ~ Jonathan Franzen
49. "It seems to me self-evident that if you have a life, things happen in it, and certain things do change; certain things end. People you know die." ~ Jonathan Franzen
50. "I feel as if I'm clearly part of a trend among writers who take themselves seriously - and I confess to taking myself as seriously as the next writer." ~ Jonathan Franzen
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C'est dans l'absolue ignorance de notre raison d'être qu'est la racine de notre tristesse et de nos dégoûts."
Author: Anatole France

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