Quotes from Jonathan Franzen

her life was already so fraught with unpleasantnesses that she'd adopted the strategy of delaying encounters with them as long as possible, even when the delay made it likely that they would be even more unpleasant when she did encounter them.

Enid and Sylvia resumed relations stiffly, their emotional muscles pulled and aching from last night's overuse.

So I envy animals. Dogs especially, because nothing smells bad to them.

Laat op de avond, als het verkeer op de snelweg eindelijk bedaarde, leken de dennen achter het woonhuis waarachtig te fluisteren.

I have often wondered what the prey is feeling when it is captured. Often it seems to become completely still in the predator's jaws, as if it feels no pain. As if nature, at the very end, shows mercy for it.

His expression was like a perspectival regression toward a vanishing point of misery.

Sometimes I get so excited thinking about my morning coffee," Mr. Söderblad said, "I can't fall asleep at night.

Shouldn't goodness be its own reward? He [Perry Hildebrandt] wondered if an action, to qualify as authentically good, needed not only to be untainted by self-interest but also to bring no pleasure of any kind.

The wind had teeth today, it bit right through his calfskin jacket. It was a wind unchecked by any serious topography between the Arctic and St. Jude.

Per me, - disse Walter, - la differenza è che gli uccelli uccidono perché devono mangiare. Non lo fanno con rabbia, non lo fanno senza motivo. Non è una cosa nevrotica. Per me è questo che rende la natura un luogo pacifico. Le cose vivono o non vivono, ma non esiste il veleno del risentimento, della nevrosi e dell'ideologia. È un sollievo dalla mia rabbia nevrotica

My apartment rightfully belongs to the people of Lithuania!

Katz had read extensively in popular sociobiology, and his understanding of the depressive personality type and its seemingly perverse persistence in the human gene pool was that depression was a successful adaptation to ceaseless pain and hardship.

I bet you're rethinking your decision not to abort me, right around now. It turns out to be so much more painful to wait twenty years for me to do it myself.

People came to this country for either money or freedom. If you don't have money, you cling to your freedoms all the more angrily. Even if smoking kills you, even if you can't afford to feed your kids, even if your kids are getting shot down by maniacs with assault rifles.

Sometimes you imagine something for so long, you find that you have no choice but to do it.

neurochemically, obsessive-compulsive disorder bears a conspicuous resemblance to falling in love. Scientists have scanned the brains of the pathologically obsessive and held them up next to brain scans of the love-struck, and the images turned colors in the same places. Doctors drew blood and found the same chemical imbalances—namely, a serotonin deficit.

Don't you love me, Mother?" Cornered by the question, she agreed to try to help him. Before she left the church, it seemed necessary to both of them that they embrace, and what an odd embrace it was, what a sick transaction. She, who wasn't capable of real love, pretended to love him while he, who really did love her, exploited her pretended love.

Chip's sphincter had meanwhile dilated nearly to the degree of unconditional surrender.

The traveler didn't see how such a place could exist in a world of Lithuanias and Polands. It was a testament to the insulatory effectiveness of political boundaries that power didn't simply arc across the gap between such divergent economic voltages.

By the time she approached his room, her steps were brisk, her false self reassembled.

you shouldn't try to save a drowning woman unless you were ready to drown yourself

It struck him that if he could have sex with this girl for one second he could face his parents confidently, and that if he could keep on having sex with this girl once every minute for as long as his parents were in town he could survive their entire visit.

When have you ever done anything but intercede for me? Everything I am I owe to you. Mother.

A drawback of email was that you could only delete it once: couldn't crumple it up, fling it to the floor, stomp on it, rip it to shreds, and burn it. Was there anything crueler, from the person who'd rejected you, than compassionate forbearance?