Quotes from Jonathan Franzen

our culture attaches too much importance to feelings, he says it's out of control, it's not computers that are making everything virtual, it's mental health. Everyone's trying to correct their thoughts and improve their feelings and work on their relationships and parenting skills instead of just getting married and raising children like they used to

He operated by Old World rules, the blurring of right and wrong into whatever you could get away with;

And yet there's other species even closer to zero. I know that. And I hope to God somebody else is worrying about 'em. I often ask myself, would I slit my own throat if I was guaranteed I could save one species by slitting it? We all know one human life is worth more than one bird's life. But is my miserable little life worth a whole species?

If time was infinite, then three seconds and three years represented the same infinitely small fraction of it.

To her the strangest thought of all was that she might be extraordinarily appealing. It went against everything she believed in, or at least against everything she wanted to believe in; because, deep down, in her most honest heart, maybe every person considered herself extraordinarily appealing. Maybe this was just a human thing.

The deader the ball, the better it suited her purpose, which was to whack the shit out of it until she was physically exhausted. She thought this was quite possibly the most satisfying thing she'd ever done.

he felt unbearably sorry for himself. It was strange that self-pity wasn't on the list of deadly sins; none was deadlier.

She could clearly perceive the contours of her obsession with him. It would have been sensible to tear it from her skull, but the object had grown too large to be removed without splitting her head open. Despite its sick enormity, it was also too beautiful to her.

It was Andreas's gift, maybe his greatest, to find singular

Impossibility is attractive. You know, the safety of dead-ended things.

And Pip wanted to do good, if only for lack of better ambitions.

The only way to avoid despair was not to involve himself at all.

I'm saying that children are not supposed to get along with their parents. Your parents are not supposed to be your best friends. There's supposed to be some element of rebellion. That's how you define yourself as a person.

Noriu tikr? dalyk? arba nenoriu nieko.

She saw a planet on which there were still seventeen thousand nukes, probably enough to wipe vertebrate life off the face of it, and thought This can't be good.

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.

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.

But like so many phenomena that were beautiful at a distance—thunderheads, volcanic eruptions, the stars and planets—this alluring pain proved, at closer range, to be inhuman in its scale.

Her life would have been easier if she hadn't loved him so much, but she couldn't help loving him. Just to look at him was to love him.

There came a time, however, when death ceased to be the enforcer of finitude and began to look, instead, like the last opportunity for radical transformation, the only plausible portal to the infinite.

There was no abstraction that couldn't be tracer fire, or the smoke of black powder, or a hollow-point's flowering. The body was worldlike in the repleteness of its possibilities, and just as no part of this little world was safe from a bullet's penetration, no form in the big world had no echo in a gun.

That his comments actually pertained to her questions—that in spite of the infinity in his eyes he was participating in a finite conversation—made up for the sourness in his face.

She'd barely registered as a person at all. She'd been little more than an inconvenient object at the breakfast table, an annoying vase in the way of his sugar bowl, not even worth telling a decent lie to. Soon enough, when she'd lost her fat, she would have more ways to make him pay. For now, the sweetest punishment would be to say nothing, let him think she knew nothing, let him damn himself by telling further lies.

a "marketing psychologist" and who advised Chip, now, to wake up and do the same), he returned to his car and discovered that each of his plastic-wrapped cheeses was protected by its own antitheft badge and that, indeed, a fragment of antitheft badge had stuck to the bottom of his left shoe. Tilton