Jonathan Franzen: Trending quotes

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

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

“Without privacy there was no point in being an individual.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people.”

“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.”

“And meanwhile the sad truth was that not everyone could be extraordinary, not everyone could be extremely cool; because whom would this leave to be ordinary?”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Life, in her experience, had a kind of velvet luster. You looked at yourself from one perspective and all you saw was weirdness. Move your head a little bit, though, and everything looked reasonably normal. She believed she couldn't hurt anybody as long as she was only working.”