Quotes from Jonathan Franzen

It was awkward to be called dear by a person you felt like calling insufferable bitch.

She didn't need to see more people, she took money from hundreds of people at the bakery, men who stared at her indecently, old women who tweezed coins from cloth pouches as if picking a nose with thumb and finger.

Have you ever been tempted to leave a thought unspoken?" "I'm a writer, baby. Voicing thought is what I'm poorly paid and uncharitably reviewed for.

Walter non aveva mai capito come vivere, ma adesso lo capiva meno che mai

The whole notion of coolness was puerile.

To be so vigorous and healthy and yet so nothing.

Your little body had once been deeper inside your mother than your father's dick had ever gone, you'd squeezed your entire goddamned head through her pussy, and then for the longest time you'd sucked on her tits whenever you felt like it, and you couldn't for the life of you remember it. You found yourself self-alienated from the get-go.

I guess I was just trying to say that the Internet is good at satisfying needs from a distance. Male or female.

La gente è venuta in questo paese per cercare soldi o libertà. Se non hai i soldi, ti aggrappi ancora più rabbiosamente alle tue libertà.

That everything in the society actually revolves about women, not men. The men are all looking at pictures of women, and the women are all communicating with other women.

I tell you everything." "Nothing that matters.

Pip wondered what the secret was of being different in a way that attracted people, as opposed to her own way.

I am a firm believer in family life. I feel that the home is the foundation of true happiness...much more the foundation than the church (or temple) or the school can ever be.

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.

A silence fell. Frogs in the night were calling, calling, calling.

It was strange that self-pity wasn't on the list of deadly sins; none was deadlier.

Kluger notes that these cases arguably amount to "personal injury claims in disguise," and that the Supreme Court has ruled that federal cigarette-labeling laws are an effective shield against such claims. Logically, in other words, the states ought to be suing smokers, not cigarette makers. And perhaps smokers, in turn, ought to be suing Social Security and private pension funds for all the money they'll save by dying early.

What happens to the people who became writers because yakking and tweeting and bragging felt to them like intolerably shallow forms of social engagement? What happens to the people who want to communicate in depth, individual to individual, in the quiet and permanence of the printed word, and who were shaped by their love of writers who wrote when publication still assured some kind of quality control and literary reputations were more than a matter of self-promotional decibel levels?

She'd been drinking jug wine steadily for four hours.

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

He was certifiably insane, an Ayn Rander who fancied himself an Übermensch and "the Singularity's chosen avatar

Once a killer, always a killer.

No one stays haunted by a person they're not still in love with.

Evil had pursued her all her life, and now the world was exploding with the color of it, and nowhere was there refuge.