Jonathan Franzen Quotes

“Stupidity mistook itself for intelligence, whereas intelligence knew its own stupidity.”

“I guess my life hasn’t always been happy, or easy, or exactly what I want. At a certain point, I just have to try not to think too much about certain things, or else they’ll break my heart.”

“What you discovered about yourself in raising children wasn't always agreeable or attractive.”

“You're either reading a book or you're not.”

“A lack of desire to spend money becomes a symptom of disease that requires expensive medication. Which medication then destroys the libido, in other words destroys the appetite for the one pleasure in life that's free, which means the person has to spend even more money on compensatory pleasures. The very definition of mental 'health' is the ability to participate in the consumer economy. When you buy into therapy, you're buying into buying.”

“How wrong to have been so negative, how wrong to have been so gloomy, how wrong to have run away from life, how wrong to have said no, again and again, instead of yes.”

“In the years when he'd worked full-time, he'd never complained about frozen or takeout or preprepared dinners. To Caroline it probably seemed that he was changing the rules on her. But to Gary it seemed that the nature of family life itself was changing - that togetherness and filiality and fraternity weren't valued the way they were when he was young.”

“Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular.”

“But she was seventeen now and not actually dumb. She knew that you could love somebody more than anything and still not love the person all that much, if you were busy with other things.”

“I’m not the person to ask about what’s normal,’ Denise answered. ‘I’ve mainly seen normal in the rearview mirror.”

“Someone worked really hard to make the language just right, just the way they wanted it. They were so sure of it that they printed it in ink, on paper. A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around. So for a literature-crazed person like me, it's just not permanent enough. …it's going to be very hard to make the world work if there's no permanence like that. That kind of radical contingency is not compatible with a system of justice or responsible self-government.”

“It's who I am. Put somebody else's comfort ahead of my own? Go hop in a toilet to spare somebody else's feelings? That's the kinda thing you do, fella. You got everything bass ackwards. And look where it's landed you.'
'Other people ought to have more consideration.'
'You oughtta have less. Me personally, I am opposed to all strictures. If you feel it, let it rip. If you want it, go for it. Dude's gotta put his own interests first.”

“But the first lesson reading teaches is how to be alone.”

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

“But nothing disturbs the feeling of specialness like the presence of other human beings feeling identically special.”

“Integrity's a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They're pure hyena.”

“Imagine that human existence is defined by an Ache: the Ache of our not being, each of us, the center of the universe; of our desires forever outnumbering our means of satisfying them.”

“Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.”

“Every good writer I know needs to go into some deep, quiet place to do work that is fully imagined. And what the Internet brings is lots of vulgar data. It is the antithesis of the imagination. It leaves nothing to the imagination.”

“He couldn't figure out if she was immensely well adjusted or seriously messed up.”

“So, what, you got cigarette burns, too?" Gitanes said.

Chip showed his palm, "It's nothing."

"Self-inflicted. You pathetic American."

"Different kind of prison" Chip said.”

“It took hours to turn the clock back 30 seconds.”

“The world was ending then, it's ending still, and I'm happy to belong to it again.”

“There's a hazardous sadness to the first sounds of someone else's work in the morning; it's as if stillness experiences pain in being broken.”

“I admire your capacity for admiring.”

“It's healthy to say uncle when your bone's about to break.”

“Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.”

“I wanted all of her and resented other boys for wanting any part of her.”

“For every reader who dies today, a viewer is born, and we seem to be witnessing… the final tipping balance.”

“His tiredness hurt so much it kept him awake.”

“I find it a huge strain to be responsible for my tastes and be known and defined by them.”

“He wanted this someone to see how much he hurt.”

“The pain was quite extraordinary. And yet also weirdly welcome and restorative, bringing him news of his aliveness and his caughtness in a story larger than himself.”

“Use well thy freedom.”

“Here was a torture that Greek inventors of the Feast and the Stone had omitted from their Hades: the Blanket of Self-Deception. A lovely warm blanket as far as it covered the soul in torment, but it never quite covered everything.”

“It was a way of recognizing places of enchantment: people falling asleep like this.”

“Nothing got inside the head without becoming pictures.”

“It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.”

“One of the consolations of dying… Seriously, the world is changing so quickly that if you had any more than 80 years of change I don't see how you could stand it psychologically.”

“The taste of self-inflicted suffering, of an evening trashed in spite, brought curious satisfactions. Other people stopped being real enough to carry blame for how you felt. Only you and your refusal remained. And like self-pity, or like the blood that filled your mouth when a tooth was pulled - the salty ferric juices that you swallowed and allowed yourself to savor - refusal had a flavor for which a taste could be acquired.”

“Today's Baudelaires are hip-hop artists.”

“It offended his sense of proportion and economy to throw away a ninety-percent serviceable string of lights. It offended his sense of himself, because he was an individual from an age of individuals, and a string of lights was, like him, an individual thing. No matter how little the thing had cost, to throw it away was to deny its value and, by extension, the value of individuals generally: to willfully designate as trash an object that you knew wasn't trash.”

“An ink bottle, which now seems impossibly quaint, was still thinkable as a symbol in 1970.”

“'What's your impression of the ship so far?' she asked. 'Is it really super authentic?'
'Well, it does seem to be floating,' Mr Söderblad said with a smile, 'in spite of heavy seas.'
Enid raised her voice to aid his comprehension. 'I mean, is it AUTHENTICALLY SCANDINAVIAN?'
'Well, yes, of course," Mr. Söderblad said. 'At the same time, everything in the world is more and more American, don't you think?'”

“Nobody can ever quite say what's wrong exactly. But they all know it's evil. They all know 'corporate' is a dirty word. And if somebody's having fun or getting rich - disgusting! Evil! And it's always the death of this and the death of that. And people who think they're free aren't 'really' free. And people who think they're happy aren't 'really' happy. And it's impossible to radically critique society anymore, although what's so radically wrong with society that we need such a radical critique, nobody can say exactly…. Here things are getting better and better for women and people of color, and gay men and lesbians, more and more integrated and open, and all you can think about is some stupid, lame problem with signifiers and signifieds.”