Quotes from Jonathan Franzen

It was so easy to blame the mother. Life a miserable contradiction, endless desire but limited supplies, your birth just a ticket to your death: why not blame the person who'd stuck you with a life? OK, maybe it was unfair. But your mother could always blame her own mother, who herself could blame the mother, and so on back to the Garden. People had been blaming the mother forever, and most of them, Andreas was pretty sure, had mothers less blameworthy than his.

I hate America," she said. "I thought Obama would change things, but it's still just guns, drones, Guant

She was one of New Prospect's original hippies, a walking yes to the question Are You Experienced?

Most of the lights were burning brightly, but near the center of the spool was a patch of unlit bulbs—a substantia nigra deep inside the tangle.

he was a lonely straight male, and a lonely straight male had no equivalently forgiving Theory of Masculinism to help him out of this bind, this key to all misogynies: To feel as if he couldn't survive without a woman made a man feel weak; And yet, without a woman in his life, a man lost the sense of agency and difference that, for better or worse, was the foundation of his manhood.

The Astors and the Vanderbilts, their pleasure domes and money: she was sick of it. 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 paucity for love was the only true thing she'd ever had.

He was like a person in two dimensions seeking freedom in a third.

In the New Testament, the only things that mattered were love and free will.

He spoke of his lifelong crusade on behalf of fifty-watt lightbulbs. ("Sixty's too bright," he said, "and forty is too dim.

It had to be possible to do better than her parents, but she wasn't sure she would.

one benefit of being a depressive pessimist, which is the propensity to laugh in dark times.

with nothing left to relish or discover, he just might die of boredom. Elective ignorance was a great survival skill, perhaps the greatest.

But what do we expect will become of students, successfully cocooned from uncomfortable feelings, once they leave the sanctuary of academe for the boorish badlands of real life?

Ever since he'd discovered a secret passageway out of self-alienation, in the form of giving himself pleasure while also receiving it, he'd increasingly resented any activity that took him away from it.

listened to ordinary citizens risking imprisonment by demanding fair elections, free travel, the neutering of the Stasi.

En general, la perspectiva del dolor, el dolor de la pérdida, de la ruptura, de la muerte, es la razón por la que resulta tan tentador eludir el amor y quedarse a salvo en el mundo del gustar

reverence, maybe

He ate arugula ("rocket," the old farmers called it) so strong it made his eyes water, like a paragraph of Thoreau.

How many times had he read the word joy without having experienced what it meant?

It was better to be angry than to be hurt; maybe even better than being loved and held by him, because maybe anger was what she'd been feeling toward him all along, anger disguised as wanting.

It's true I'm male and have some power, but I never asked to be born male. Maybe being male is like being born a predator, and maybe the only right thing for the predator to do, if it sympathizes with smaller animals and won't accept that it was born to kill them, is to betray its nature and starve to death. But maybe it's like something else—like being born with more money than others. Then the right thing to do becomes a more interesting social question.

It was the prospect of another two or three or five years of sex in the ashes that made me think of death.

El dolor se presenta como producto e indicador naturales de estar vivo en un mundo que opone resistencia. Pasar por la vida indoloramente es no haber vivido.

Lenin had been a risk-taker. Trotsky had been one, too, until Stalin had made him the Bill Gates of the Soviet Union, the excoriated crypto-reactionary.