Quotes from Jonathan Franzen

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?

As soon as she hit the Send button, she had a spasm of remorse; her interval between action and remorse was diminishing so rapidly that soon she might be all remorse, unable to act at all; which might not be such a bad thing.

The tone of the new ones, in their TED Talks, in PowerPointed product launches, in testimony to parliaments and congresses, in utopianly titled books, was a smarmy syrup of convenient conviction and personal surrender that he remembered well from the Republic. He

People came to this country for either money or freedom. If you don't have money, you cling to your freedoms all the more angrily. Even if smoking kills you, even if you can't afford to feed your kids, even if your kids are getting shot down by maniacs with assault rifles. You may be poor, but the one thing nobody can take away from you is the freedom to fuck up your life whatever way you want to.

When the sex is persuasively rendered, it tends to read autobiographically, and there are limits to my desire for immersion in a stranger's biochemistry.

I think badness is the fundamental condition of humanity.

If you choose to spend an hour every day tinkering with your Facebook profile, or if you don't see any difference between reading Jane Austen on a Kindle and reading her on a printed page, or if you think Grand Theft Auto IV is the greatest Gesamtkunstwerk since Wagner, I'm very happy for you, as long as you keep it to yourself.

It was clear to everyone that day, and in the months that followed, that Patty's greatest warming influence was on Walter himself. Now, instead of speeding by his neighbors in his angry Prius, he stopped to lower his window and say hello. On weekends, he brought Patty over to the patch of clear ice that the neighborhood kids maintained for hockey and instructed her in skating, which, in a remarkably short time, she became rather good at.

Walking is broken falls, the body leaning, the legs advancing to catch it.

We girls are supposed to at least have these amazing sexual powers, but in my recent experience this is just a lie told by men to make them feel better about having ALL the power.

Her heart was full and her senses were sharp, but her head felt liable to burst in the vacuum of her solitude.

Wasn't asking for a recipe supposed to be good coin of the feminine realm?

Then again, there had always been something not quite right about the Berglunds.

According to Scripture, earthly life was but a moment, but the moment seemed spacious when he was with her.

She told herself a story about a daughter in a family so hungry for a daughter that it would have eaten her alive if she hadn't run away.

I think there's a real hunger for people speaking truth to power. Like, there's a little minority now that's saying you sounded like an asshole and a whiner. But that's just the player-hating fringe. I wouldn't worry about it.

Her very difficulty created friction, and friction led to satisfaction...

He cursed a little, not so much because he cared about the photographs as because he wanted to preserve his good spirits, his serotonin-rich mood, and to do this he needed a modicum of cooperation from the world of objects.

He knows how love blinds people to the truth about the one they are in love with.

although in truth her passivity was calculated, because she knew passivity inflamed him. He had her, and to some extent she wanted to be had, like an animal: in a mute mutual privacy of violence.

A candle is like a small sun, but the sun is like a large candle; examined closely, language turns out to operate through the lateral associations of metaphor, rather than through the vertical identifications of naming.

The following afternoon, alone in their room, and oppressed by not yet having made the promised call to Connie...

There was, of course, nowhere better in the world to be than New York City. This fact was the foundation of her family's satisfaction with itself, the platform from which all else could be ridiculed, the collateral of adult sophistication that bought them the right to behave like children.

Local politicians of color said children and tomorrow. They said digital and democracy and history.