Quotes from Jonathan Franzen

With public opinion, he said, there's weather, and then there's climate. You're trying to change the climate, and that takes time.

Aveva perso le tracce di ciò che voleva, e poiché una persona è ciò che vuole, si poteva dire che avesse perso le tracce di se stesso.

But what you are saying now, the way you're speaking to me - there's a level to this that I never saw when you were in the group. A level of honesty, vulnerability. If you could have opened yourself up like this even once… It's kind of amazing to see it now.

She'd visited the Continent five times on vacation and twice on business trips with Alfred, so about a dozen times altogether, and to friends planning tours of Spain or France she now liked to say, with a sigh, that she'd had her fill of the place.

People who like to be in control of things can have a hard time with intimacy. Intimacy is anarchic and mutual and definitionally incompatible with control. You seek to control things because you are afraid.

Que una persona no dé buen uso a su vida no significa que su vida deje de transcurrir. De hecho, su vida transcurre aún más deprisa.

There's never been much love lost between literature and the marketplace. The consumer economy loves a product that sells at a premium, wears out quickly or is susceptible to regular improvement, and offers with each improvement some marginal gain in usefulness. To an economy like this, news that stays news is not merely an inferior product; it's an antithetical product. A classic work of literature is inexpensive, infinitely reusable, and, worst of all, unimprovable.

His resentment of his wife, Caroline, was moderate and well contained.

it would have been better to have forced herself to see more of her parents in the critical years of her own parenthood, so as to better understand her kids' response to her.

the weekly thirty minutes of sexual stress was a chronic but low-grade discomfort, like the humidity in Florida

The first thing that reading teaches us is how to be alone ~~Jonathan Franzen

I'm a carnivore, a carnivore, a terrible disgusting carnivore.

Poor people smoked, poor people ate Krispy Kreme doughnuts by the dozen. Poor people were made pregnant by close relatives. Poor people practiced poor hygiene and lived in toxic neighborhoods. Poor people with their ailments constituted a subspecies of humanity that thankfully remained invisible to Gary except in hospitals and in places like Central Discount Medical.

It didn't feel so bad to be an orphan. It felt like the first day of a long vacation, a day as empty as the January sky was clear and sunny.

All morning, on and off the floor, her mind was so scrambled with self-consciousness that when she opened her mouth her mind lagged behind and then dashed forward, propelled by the anxiety that what she was saying was unintelligible. Each time, she found that she'd spoken halfway appropriately, and each time this seemed like amazing luck.

How like a mental illness a nation's economy was!

He'd come to Los Angeles to break into the movies as a writer. His soul was still alive then, but he'd met a girl who had dreams of her own, and one thing led to another, and now he was just another member of the goddamned middle class, suckering people for living.

It's the fate of most Ping-Pong tables in home basements eventually to serve the ends of other, more desperate games.

To dream of happiness, wake up, and walk on air Is to know the chance of happiness awake is there.

There's a hazardous sadness to the first sounds of someone else's work in the morning; it's as if stillness experiences pain in being broken. The first minute of the workday reminds you of all the other minutes that a day consists of, and it's never a good thing to think of minutes as individuals. Only after other minutes have joined the naked, lonely first minute does the day become more safely integrated in its dayness. Patty waited for this to happen before she left the bathroom.

You wouldn't believe how quickly the most interesting person in the world can turn into the most boring person you'll ever meet.

since a person couldn't exist in two places at once, the more he existed as the Internet's image of him, the less he felt like he existed as a flesh-and-blood person.

She seemed more pitiable than murderable.

Charles was at the apex of his career, coming off a Lannan Fellowship year and a front-page Times review that had anointed him as the heir of John Barth and Stanley Elkin, but he didn't know it was the apex.