Jonathan Franzen: Trending quotes (page 2)

“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.”