Quotes from Jonathan Franzen

Well, and that's what really counts, isn't it? I've become one of those women who put a ton of work into looking OK. If I can just go on and make a beautiful corpse, I'll have the whole problem pretty well licked.

It's something to be anxious about, Manley said, if you want to be anxious about something.

Simply being a social isolate as a child does not, however, doom you to bad breath and poor party skills as an adult. In fact, it can make you hypersocial. It's just that at some point you'll begin to feel a gnawing, almost remorseful need to be alone and do some reading - to reconnect to that community.

What lived on-in me- was the discomfort of how completely I'd outgrown the novel I'd once been so happy to live in

When a smoker says he wants to quit but can't, what he's really saying is, "I want to quit but I want even more not to suffer the agony of withdrawal." To argue otherwise is to jettison any lingering notion of personal responsibility.

that the more he rebelled against his parents and the more he made his life a reproach to theirs, the more deeply he rooted himself in the same childish relation to them.

I'm telling you that I will be all right without you. Everything we have is temporary, the joy, the suffering, everything. I had the joy of experiencing your goodness for a very long time. It was enough. I have no right to ask for more.

Cooks were the mitochondria of humanity; they had their own separate DNA, they floated in a cell and powered it but were not really of it.

Life a miserable contradiction, endless desire but limited supplies, your birth just a ticket to your death:

Did his soul change every time it achieved a new insight? The very definition of a soul was immutability. Perhaps the root of his confusion was the conflation of soul and knowledge. Perhaps the soul was one of those tools built to do exactly one specific task, to know that I am I, and was mutable with respect to all other forms of knowledge?

Sleep was the ideally work-compatible girl he ought to have married in the first place. Perfectly submissive, infinitely forgiving, and so respectable you could take her to church.

It's like there are these words, they're out there in the world, and you start wondering what it would be like to say them. Words have their own power—they create the feeling, just by the fact of your saying them.

The lump in his throat was evidence of how much, in spite of everything, he still loved her.

As if sustained and too-direct contact with time's raw passage could scar the nerves permanently, like staring at the sun.

Yeah, well, we're all grieving in our own way, obviously. It's just I heard this crazy rumor about your having inherited twenty-two million dollars. He tried to meet her eyes, but she'd turned away, squeezing her thumbs, fists balled. Crazy, huh? But getting back to this lunch, let's see, Mr. Aldren and whatever his name is, Tweedledum, they had steak, right? And Mr. Stoorhuys-- He snapped his fingers. Rabbit. Half a rabbit, grilled. Or what do you call it? Braised.

Yes, but that's because you're not poor. When you're poor, things just happen to you. You feel like you can't control anything. You're completely at God's mercy. That's why Jesus tells us that the poor are blessed—because having nothing brings you closer to God." "That woman didn't strike me as being especially close to God.

She'd listened to a lot of these utopian discussions, and it was somehow comforting that Stephen and his friends could never quite work all the kinks out of their plan; that the world was as obstinately unfixable as her life was.

You see a person with kids," she said, "and you see how happy they are to be a parent, and you're attracted to their happiness. Impossibility is attractive. You know, the safety of dead-ended things.

Can you imagine going to bed with Kierkegaard? He'd never stop asking, 'Can I do this to you? Is this okay?

The interesting people are always immoderate.

She had a lifetime of practice at arriving late in a family of four and being loved by all.

There was a kind of liberation in jettisoning all thought of being a good person.

Gary had hoped to find her more cooperative. He already had one alternative sibling and he didn't need another. It frustrated him that people could so happily drop out of the world of conventional expectations; it felt like a unilateral rewriting, to his disadvantage, of the rules of life.

As she left her parents' neighborhood, the houses got newer and bigger and boxier. Through windows with no mullions or fake plastic mullions she could see luminous screens, some giant, some miniature. Evidently every hour of the year, including this one, was a good hour for staring at a screen.