Quotes from Jonathan Franzen

but 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.

In the instant before it was over and pure nothing, he heard all the human voices in the world.

To have an identity, you have to believe that other identities equally exist. You need closeness with other people. And how is closeness built? By sharing secrets.

They had the beauty of the second glance, the beauty that only revealed itself with intimacy.

The problem with a life freely chosen every day, a New Testament life, was that it could end at any moment.

Cuando te quedas en tu habitación y te encolerizas o adoptas una actitud de desdén o te encoges de hombros, como hice muchos años, el mundo y sus problemas te intimidan de manera extraordinaria. Pero cuando sales y estableces una relación real con personas reales, o incluso con animales reales, existe el peligro muy real de acabar queriendo a alguno de ellos.

He could see the desired outcomes, the drowning at sea, the shotgun blast, the plunge from a height, so near to him still that he refused to believe he had lost the opportunity to avail himself of their relief.

And yet: guilt must be the most monstrous of human quantities, because what I did to relieve my guilt then—stay in the marriage—was precisely the thing I felt guiltiest about later, when the marriage was over.

There were a thousand things she wanted from life, and since few were available at home [...], she had forcibly channeled all her wanting into the numbered days, the mayfly lifetime, that the luxury cruise would last. For months the cruise had been her mind's safe parking space, the future that made her present bearable [...].

With his shyness and his formality and his tyrannical rages he protected his interior so ferociously that if you loved him, as she did, you learned that you could do him no greater kindness than to respect his privacy.

When I'm writing I don't want anyone else in the room - including myself.

They rode an elevator in silence. Too-precipitous intimacy had left in its wake a kind of dirty awkwardness.

Joey aveva sorriso con furia per impedirsi di piangere. La sua ferita gli sembrava strutturale, come se lui e suo padre avessero scelto le proprie idee politiche al solo scopo di odiarsi, e l'unico modo per uscirne fosse il distacco.

she tuned out the tour guide and heeded the October angle of the yellow light, the heart-mangling intensities of the season. In the wind pushing waves across the bay she could smell night's approach. It was coming at her fast: mystery and pain and a strange yearning sense of possibility, as though heartbreak were a thing to be sought and moved toward.

Enid had chosen to believe the promise of his looks. Life then became a matter of waiting for his personality to change.

As long as mitigating climate change trumps all other environmental concerns, no landscape on Earth is safe.

Things that were forbidden were often precisely what the heart most wanted. Things became more attractive because they were forbidden by some cruel or uncomprehending authority.

No wonder, I thought, her little routines meant so much to her. She gave me so many insights into my own life but, too, an insight into the lives of people who wake up alone every morning and find the courage to get out of bed and show their face.

And the posture of the older oak trees reaching toward this sky had a jut, a wildness and entitlement, predating permanent settlement; memories of an unfenced world were written in the cursive of their branches.

For most of my life, I didn't pay attention to birds.

Manhattan is just all bank branches.

We may freak out globally, but we suffer locally.

Fiction that isn't an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn't worth writing for anything but money.

There is, after all, a kind of happiness in unhappiness, if it's the right unhappiness.