Quotes from Jonathan Franzen

Part of why kids like this scared me was that they seemed authentic.

His problem consisted of a burning wish not to have done the things he'd done.

There seemed to be almost nothing left of Lalitha; she was breaking up on him the way dead songbirds did in the wild-they were impossibly light to begin with, and as soon as their little hearts stopped beating they were barely more than bits of fluff and hollow bone, easily scatterd in the wind-but this only made him more determined to hold onto what little of her he still had.

My practical intelligence said no, but my heart said yes.

The American middle-class appetite for illegal drugs provided the capital to build some of the most sophisticated and effective companies on earth.

I used to be the kind of religious nut who convinces himself that, because the world doesn't share his particular faith (for me, a faith in literature), we must be living in End Times.

Impossibility is attractive.

The thing about games is that you don't want to look too closely at why you're playing them. A great yawning emptiness underlies them, a close relative of the nothingness that lies beneath the surface of our busy lives.

You have some fine qualities, but imagination was never one of them.

Para mí, el azul mediterráneo ya no es bonito. La transparencia de sus aguas, tan valorada por los veraneantes, es la misma que la de una piscina estéril. En sus playas hay pocos olores y pocas aves, y sus profundidades van camino de vaciarse; gran parte del pescado que ahora se consume en Europa procede ilegalmente, sin que nadie indague mucho, del océano del oeste de África. Miro el azul y no veo un mar, sino una postal, fina como un papel.

I don't think I'm any different than any woman. I mean, any woman who hasn't had her mind fucked up by male religion.

Patty's] Copernican wish to the be sun around which all things revolved

three Crossroads sophomores were shoveling snow with a zeal that suggested their work was voluntary.

advancing through my schedule without volition, feeling more and more like the graphical lozenge on a media player's progress bar.

The rage inside him was titanic. How to keep from exploding? What a relief exploding was.

The apparatchiks, too, were an eternal type. 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.

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. Does that make any sense?

Two empty hours were a sinus in which infections bred.

He became another data point in the American experiment of self-government, an experiment statistically skewed from the outset, because it wasn't the people with sociable genes who fled the crowded Old World for the new continent; it was the people who didn't get along well with others.

The shame and disorder in his house were like the shame and disorder in his head.

Il Paradiso e l'inferno ce li creiamo da soli.

You need closeness with other people. And how is closeness built? By sharing secrets. Colleen

Only once, and only because I was very young, could I have merged my identity with another person's, and singularities like this are where you find eternity.

I'm the fat little humiliation he's married to.