Quotes from Jonathan Franzen

The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through...ringing throughout the house was an alarm bell that no one but Alfred and Enid could hear directly.

theoretically sorry

Sheets of rain were ripping themselves on the apple trees outside the window.

Some of the most influential novels of recent years, by Rachel Cusk and Karl Ove Knausgaard, take the method of self-conscious first-person testimony to a new level. Their more extreme admirers will tell you that imagination and invention are outmoded contrivances; that to inhabit the subjectivity of a character unlike the author is an act of appropriation, even colonialism; that the only authentic and politically defensible mode of narrative is autobiography.

Meeting a choice adolescent now was like smelling strawberries when you were hungry for a steak.

The first thing reading teaches us is how to be alone

The country as a whole had become so hostile to the have-nots that large numbers of the have-nots themselves now voted against their own economic interests.

All of them giggled and swaggered in that happy ascendancy, repellent in any land, of teens on their turf.

You didn't have to write to be a poet, you didn't have to create things to be an artist. Her mother's spiritual Endeavor was itself a kind of art—an art of invisibility.

Filtering isn't phoniness—it's civilization.

It was love that worked miracles; no force on earth was more powerful.

Patty começou a chorar por motivos que se sentia triste demais para examinar.

There was something almost tasty and almost sexy in letting the annoying boy be punished by her husband. In standing blamelessly aside while the boy suffered for having hurt her. What you discovered about yourself in raising children wasn't always agreeable or attractive.

But strict limits to intimacy are the straight man's burden.

But she, in a sense, had betrayed him first. If she hadn't been so supportive of his failings, he might have made peace long ago.

I'm just happy you're home safely.

Every facet of Amarillo a testament to a nation of bad-ass firsts: first in prison population, first in meat consumption, first in operational strategic warheads, first in per-capita carbon emissions, first in line for the Rapture. Whether American liberals liked it or not, Amarillo was how the rest of the world saw their country.

The cabin was dark. Inside it was the sound of her childhood, the patter of rain on a roof that consisted only of shingle and bare boards, no insulation or ceiling. She associated the sound with her mother's love, which had been as reliable as the rain in its season. Waking up in the night and hearing the rain still pattering the same way it had when she'd fallen asleep, hearing it night after night, had felt so much like being loved that the rain might have been love itself.

La brezza fredda e il fumo della Camel si mescolavano come gioia e rimorso.

There was such a relative paucity of smells in California that the interconnectedness of all possible smells was not apparent. She

Worse than spanking or even liver was the sound of someone else's Ping-Pong.

She was like a bank too big in her mother's economy to fail

Is this irony, hypocrisy, or a contradiction? I'm never sure which term is appropriate." "Call it all three if you want," Andreas said. "Chutzpah. That's a fourth term.

Leila would have been well advised, before marrying a novelist or imagining herself as one, to wait and sample life in a house where a big book was being contemplated.