Quotes from Jonathan Franzen

I can't stomach any kind of notion that serious fiction is good for us, because I don't believe that everything that's wrong with the world has a cure, and even if I did, what business would I, who feel like the sick one, have in offering it? It's hard to consider literature a medicine; sooner or later the therapeutically minded reader will end up fingering reading itself as the sickness.

Technological capitalism is an infernal machine. It always has its way with us. If it doesn't dismantle the Postal Service from without, it will steal its soul from within. The attachment of Americans to their post office is pure nostalgia. It's the double vision of a people whose hearts don't like what their desires have created.

So many Jonathans . A plague of literary Jonathans .

In the elevator it seemed to Enid that the ship was suffering not only from a seesaw motion but also from a yaw, as if its bow were the face of someone experiencing repugnance.

One day he went to a rally in Hartford for Ralph Nader and other Green Party candidates and assembled a spectacle that he called the Dopplerpus, which consisted of a rented carnival octopus ride on whose tentacles he and seven friends sat and played dirges on portable amps while the ride flung them around and distorted their sound interestingly.

Il grimpa l'escalier menant à son appartement dont il avait été si éloigné durant les deux ans et demi passés que le lieu semblait s'être retourné contre lui, ne plus vouloir être son chez-lui.

In terms of having an experience, seriously contemplating a murder was almost as good as going through with it, and it had the added benefit of not entailing risk.

She was a little bit in love with Tom, too, because she could afford to be, because she wasn't physically attracted to him - he was both older and 'safe'.

Various chemicals that molecular floodgates had been holding back all afternoon burst loose and flooded Gary's neural pathways. A cascade of reactions initiated by Factor 6 relaxed his tear valves and sent a wave of nausea down his vagus: a "sense" that he survived from day to day by distracting himself from underground truths that day by day grew more compelling and decisive. The truth that he was going to die. That heaping your tomb with treasure wouldn't save you.

Russ Hildebrandt] 'I don't deserve joy!' [Marion Hildebrandt] 'No one does. It's a gift from God.

Nowadays there is really only one habit of highly effective people: Don't fall behind with email.

Esa no era la persona que él creía ser, o la que habría elegido ser si hubiera tenido la libertad de elegir, pero había algo reconfortante y liberador en ser una persona real y definida, y no una colección de personas potenciales y contradictorias.

Weak people hold grudges, Mom. Strong people forgive.

Silence, however, is a useful statement only if someone, somewhere, expects your voice to be loud.

Her problem at Renewable Solutions was that she could never quite figure out what she was selling, even when she was finding people to buy it, and no sooner had she finally begun to figure it out than she was asked to sell something else.

To herself, she was no longer the person who'd left him waiting forever in her bedroom and then rained abuse on him, but he had no way of knowing this, because, of course, she was also still that person.

Among novelists I know, no one is more ambitious than I am.

She felt as if, while working and sleeping and working and sleeping, she'd aged so rapidly that she'd passed Emile and caught up with her parents.

Whatever chemistry she and Jason had had was still there, if only in the form of regret about never really having acted on it.

Now that I'm blind, I can see there is nothing to see.

He was so immersed and implicated in the Internet, so enmeshed in its totalitarianism, that his online existence was coming to seem realer than his physical self.

She was certainly hungry to sleep with someone; it was practically forever since she'd done it. But she liked Jason a little too much to think it was a good idea to sleep with him. What if she started liking him even more? Relationship pain and relationship horror seemed probable.

I hate the concept of likeability—it gave us two terms of George Bush, whom a plurality of voters wanted to have a beer with, and Facebook. You'd unfriend a lot of people if you knew them as intimately and unsparingly as a good novel would. But not the ones you actually love.

It was exceedingly improbable that he would ever see the men again, but, as my father said, you never knew. Always worth approaching every man you met as if he might become your best friend in the world.