Quotes from Jonathan Franzen

I had started keeping a journal, and I was discovering that I didn't need school in order to experience the misery of appearances. I could manufacture excruciating embarrassment in the privacy of my bedroom, simply by reading what I'd written in the journal the day before. Its pages faithfully mirrored my fraudulence and pomposity and immaturity. Reading it made me desperate to change myself, to sound less idiotic.

El sol bajo, en el cielo: luminaria menor, estrella enfriándose. Ráfagas de desorden, sucesivas. Árboles inquietos, temperaturas en descenso

How the hours can pass with mere kissing is lost to me now, along with the rest of my youth.

He reminded me of a beaver, all uncorrected overbite and senseless industry.

Sick of envying, sick of herself. She didn't understand antiques or architecture, she couldn't draw like Sylvia, she didn't read like Ted, she had few interests and no expertise. A capacity for love was the only true thing she'd ever had.

His inner life now consisted of little but obsessing about his image on an Internet that felt like death to him; of

Every man seeking salvation had a signature weakness to remind him of his nullity before the Lord and complicate communion with Him.

It was like watching a pair of Hollywood execs abuse each other—you had to be powerful to take the abuse with a laugh.

The infinite variety of human badness.

Un inconvenient del correu electrònic és que només el pots esborrar una vegada: no pots arrugar-lo, rebotre'l contra el terra, trepitjar-lo, fer-ne mil bocins i cremar-lo. Hi podia haver alguna cosa més cruel, per part d'algú que t'acabava de rebutjar, que una paciència compassiva?

The problem is we trust technology. We put our trust in the safing of the warheads, and we neglect the human side, because tech problems are easy and human problems are hard.

Gary wished that all further migration to the coasts could be banned and all midwesterners encouraged to revert to eating pasty foods and wearing dowdy clothes and playing board games, in order that a strategic national reserve of cluelessness might be maintained, a wilderness of taste which would enable people of privilege, like himself, to feel extremely civilized in perpetuity—

There was no arguing with blood.

simply by trying to speak honestly, surrendering to emotion, supporting other people in their honesty and emotion, she experienced her first glimmerings of spirituality.

Overindulgence had shattered his lambent rationality into myriad splinters, each consisting of an insight unrelated to any other, each brightly reflecting a star-hot whiteness now blazing in his stomach; he thought he might vomit.

While man experienced time as a progression, from unknown past to unknowable future, to God the entire course of history was eternally present

People steal elephants. It happens all the time.

Hour after hour, my father lay unmoving and worked his way toward death; but when he yawned, the yawn was his. And his body, wasted though it was, was likewise still radiantly his.

Her life with Tom was strange and ill-defined and permanently temporary but therefore all the more a life of true life, because it was freely chosen every day, every hour. It reminded her of a distinction she'd learned as a child in Sunday school. Their marriages had been Old Testament, hers a matter of honouring her covenant with Charles, Tom's a matter of fearing Anabel's wrath and judgement. In the New Testament, the only things that mattered were love and free will.

Along the deserted road to the gas station were mercury-vapor lights that seemed weaker than those in New Prospect, as if Navajo impoverishment extended even to amperage.

Never mind what's going on underneath. As long as we're all 'civil.

It made him very anxious. The feeling was like something from a dream, a dreamer's panicked sense of needing to be somewhere else, of being late for an important exam, of having forgotten he had a train to catch. How absurd that he'd thought he needed to prove himself stronger than his father. He'd been fighting a battle long since won, in an irrelevant sector of the dreamworld.

In Technology We Trust. Need to put that on the new hundred-dollar bill.

cut back on my own work, passing up an opportunity to follow the Dukakis campaign for Rolling Stone, and I was losing friends the way addicts do, by canceling dates at the last minute.