Quotes from Jonathan Franzen

She'd seen enough of socialism to foresee its ultimate failure, she knew the Soviets to be thieves, rapists, and murderers, and she never got over the shock of discovering that my father was rich only in comparison to Jena, only the way most Americans were rich.

To love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.

seemed as if the Internet was governed more by fear: the fear of unpopularity and uncoolness, the fear of missing out, the fear of being flamed or forgotten.

After Gary had given the enlargements their sour baths, he raised the lights and discovered that both prints were webbed over with peculiar yellow blotches. He cursed a little, not so much because he cared about the prints as because he wanted to preserve his good spirits, his serotonin-rich mood, and to do this he needed... cooperation from the world of objects.

No existe nadie cuya personalidad real nos guste hasta la última partícula. Por eso, un mundo donde todo consiste en gustar es en última instancia una mentira. Pero sí existe la persona de cuya personalidad real uno ama hasta la última partícula. Y por eso el amor representa tal amenaza existencial para el orden del tecnoconsumismo: Saca a la luz la mentira

Secrets are the way you know you even have an inside.

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.

Clem couldn't stand to be in the same room with him. He was giving up his student deferment to show his father what a strong man did.

The Berglunds were the super-guilty sort of liberals who needed to forgive everybody so their own good fortune could be forgiven; who lack the courage of their privilege

You could slap his wrist for saying it, but then he said it with his face, and you could spank him for making faces, but then he said it with his eyes, and there were limits to correction—no way, in the end, to penetrate behind the blue irises and eradicate a boy's disgust.

You know you'd rather read about me than experience me in person. Why pretend?

From somewhere, in college, Pip had gotten the idea—her mind was like a balloon with static cling, attracting random ideas as they floated by—that the height of civilization was to spend Sunday morning reading an actual paper copy of the Sunday New York Times at a café. This had become her weekly ritual, and, in truth

he only ran that house as a way to

A cascade of reactions initiated by Factor 6 relaxed his tear valves and sent a wave of nausea down his vagus: a "sense" that he survived from day to day by distracting himself from underground truths that day by day grew more compelling and decisive. The truth that he was going to die. That heaping your tomb with treasure wouldn't save you.

Invisible Facebook and Google algorithms steer you toward content you agree with, and nonconforming voices stay silent for fear of being flamed or trolled or unfriended. The result is a silo in which, whatever side you're on, you feel absolutely right to hate what you hate.

Was there anything more sweetly existential than the walking done for sex in the most desolate of streets at three in the morning? The casual slaughter of a reasonable sleep schedule? The strangeness of passing someone's hair-curlered mother in a bathrobe on your way to her heartrendingly hideous bathroom?

Time and again Gary had the feeling that there was something disagreeable that his family wanted to forget, something only he insisted on remembering; something requiring only his nod, his go-ahead, to be forgotten. This feeling, too, was a Warning Sign.

cheap euphoria smeared across their faces like the juice of sex and peaches, who thought that this was what baseball was about

In effetti quando faceva compere in un grande magazzino i vestiti e gli utensili che non le sembravano connotanti risultavano sempre i più costosi nel loro genere. Chiaramente, se eri abbastanza ricco, potevi comprare la trasparenza.

Taken together, the animals reminded Pip that she was an animal herself; the multitude of shames she'd left behind in Oakland seemed of smaller consequence at Los Volcanes.

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.

Taking a cab to the city center, she was pierced unexpectedly by regret for not doing exactly that: not walking the streets as an independent adult woman, not cultivating an independent life, not being a sensible and curious tourist instead of a love-chasing madwoman.

Si rese conto di quanto dovessero essere nere le notti nel centro di una città di duecento anni fa [...] e di come gli edifici potessero trovare riposo, ciechi ed esanimi come le persone addormentate al loro interno.

My father had always been supremely suspicious of psychiatry. He viewed therapy as an invasion of privacy, mental health as a matter of self-discipline , and my mother's increasingly pointed suggestions that he talk to someone as acts of aggression - little lobbed grenades of blame for their unhappiness as a couple.