Quotes from Jonathan Franzen

He thought of calling her again, if only to resupply himself with shame, but the purity of the hurt of losing her was of a piece with the season's dark afternoons and long nights.

Nature even on the most local of scales made a mockery of information technology. Even augmented by tech, the human brain was paltry, infinitesimal, in comparison to the universe.

Watching him fall down and pick himself back up, Perry mourned no longer being small enough that falling didn't hurt. He no longer even remembered how it felt to have the ground so unthreateningly proximate. Why had he been in such a hurry to grow up? It was as if he'd never experienced the grace of childhood.

She was having an outburst with no advance warning.

Respectless and depraved, maybe. But happily respectless, happily depraved.

Well, just remember," Gary said, "there's more to life than cooking. You're at a stage now where you need to start thinking about what you really want and how you're going to get it.

Not just the industrial farming but the sprawl, the sprawl, the sprawl. Low-density development is the worst. And SUVs everywhere, snowmobiles everywhere, Jet Skis everywhere, ATVs everywhere, two-acre lawns everywhere. The goddamned green monospecific chemical-drenched lawns.

him under house arrest was in his head. Hearing

What would it be like to live with a person capable of joy?

I segreti erano potere. I soldi erano potere. Essere necessari a qualcuno era potere. Potere, potere, potere: com'era possibile che il mondo girasse intorno alla lotta per una cosa che creava solitudine e angoscia in chi la possedeva?

Mephistopheles: Over! A stupid word. How so over? Over and pure nothing: completely the same thing! "It's over now!" What's that supposed to mean? It's as good as if it never was.

He wasn't constituted to hate himself subjectively, but he did hate the object he was in the world.

L'America, [...] il paese della libertà, il luogo dei grandi spazi aperti dove un figlio poteva ancora sentirsi speciale. Niente, però, disturba questa sensazione quanto la presenza di altri esseri umani che si sentono altrettanto speciali.

Around her ribs and waist were curves of the kind that wind carves in snowdrifts.

What's it do?" she said. "Absolutely nothing," Hibbard replied, "if you are in perfect mental health. However, let's face it, who is?

Google and Accurint can make you feel very smart, but the best stories come when you're out in the field.

the entire story is prefigured in that monologue...

Sex with a squirrel who had exciting breasts beneath her little-kid pajamas was not without its appeal

Ora si rendeva conto […] che aveva sempre odiato essere la figlia di un pastore. I padri delle sue amiche progettavano edifici, curavano malattie, perseguivano criminali. Suo padre era come un fabbricante di croci, però peggio. La sua fede ardente, la sua santità, erano un odore che aveva sempre minacciato di aderire a lei, come la puzza delle Chesterfield, però peggio, perché non si poteva lavare via.

The one thing everyone in the Republic had plenty of was time. Whatever you didn't do today really could be put off until tomorrow.

Clem didn't know a man who worked more passionately for social justice than his father, and when you really loved someone, the whole person, you simply accepted the little things you might have wished were different. He could see eyes being rolled when his father waxed religious at a fellowship meeting, but Becky herself rolled her eyes like that. It didn't mean she didn't love him.

We just went through a bad divorce. - Violent bad? Restraining-order bad? - No, no. Just emotionally painful. - OK, so an ordinary divorce.

Joey described to her the sleek warm neatness of her turds as they slid from her anus and fell into his open mouth, where, since they were only words, they tasted like excellent dark chocolate.

entered a kind of trance of not-herselfness.