Jonathan Franzen Quotes

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

Source: Freedom

“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.”

Source: Freedom

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

Source: How to Be Alone

“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.”

Source: The Corrections

“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.”

Source: The Corrections

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

Source: The Corrections

Jonathan Franzen book Strong Motion

Source: Strong Motion

“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.”

Source: How to Be Alone

“I admire your capacity for admiring.”

Source: Freedom

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

Source: Freedom

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

Source: How to Be Alone

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

Source: How to Be Alone

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

Source: The Discomfort Zone: A Personal Journey

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

Source: How to Be Alone

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

Source: The Corrections

Jonathan Franzen book Strong Motion

Source: Strong Motion

“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.”

Source: The Corrections

Source: Freedom

“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.”

Source: Freedom

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

Source: The Corrections

“Nothing got inside the head without becoming pictures.”

Source: The Corrections

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

Source: The Corrections

“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.”

"Jonathan Franzen Warns Ebooks are Corroding Values," http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jan/30/jonathan-franzen-ebooks-values The Guardian (Jan 30, 2012).

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

The Corrections (2001)

“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.”

Voices in the Wilderness The Guardian (Saturday 28 September 2002).

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

The Corrections (2001)