Jonathan Franzen Quotes

66 Sourced Quotes

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.

Jonathan Franzen
You could slap his wrist for saying it, but then he said it with his face, and you could spank him for making faces, but then he said it with his eyes, and there were limits to correction-no way, in the end, to penetrate behind the blue irises and eradicate a boy's disgust.

Jonathan Franzen
The novelist has more and more to say to readers who have less and less time to read: where to find the energy to engage a culture in crisis when the crisis consists in the impossibility of engaging with the culture?

Jonathan Franzen
If multiculturalism succeeds in making us a nation of independently empowered tribes, each tribe will be deprived of the comfort of victimhood and be forced to confront human limitation for what it is: a fixture of life.

Jonathan Franzen
Then she waited, with parted lips and a saucy challenge in her eyes, to see how her presence — the drama of being her — was registering. In the way of such chicks, she seemed convinced of the originality of her provocation.

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

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

Jonathan Franzen
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
The problem with making a virtual world of oneself is akin to the problem with projecting ourselves onto a cyberworld: there's no end of virtual spaces in which to seek stimulation, but their very endlessness, the perpetual stimulation without satisfaction, becomes imprisoning.

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

Jonathan Franzen
Elective ignorance was a great survival skill, perhaps the greatest.

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

Jonathan Franzen
Each new thing he encountered in life impelled him in a direction that fully convinced him of its rightness, but then the next new thing loomed up and impelled him in the opposite direction, which also felt right. There was no controlling narrative: he seemed to himself a purely reactive pinball in a game whose only object was to stay alive for staying alive's sake.

Jonathan Franzen
If you want to have friends, you have to remember that nobody's perfect.

Jonathan Franzen
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.

Jonathan Franzen
She was so much a personality and so little anything else that even staring straight at her he had no idea what she really looked like.

Jonathan Franzen
Being dead's only a problem if you know you're dead, which you never do because you're dead!

Jonathan Franzen
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.

Jonathan Franzen
The human species was given dominion over the earth and took the opportunity to exterminate other species and warm the atmosphere and generally ruin things in its own image, but it paid this price for its privileges: that the finite and specific animal body of this species contained a brain capable of conceiving the infinite and wishing to be infinite itself.

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

Jonathan Franzen
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.

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

Jonathan Franzen
Sounded to me like he had a pretty good idea what he was saying," Van replied, with surprisingly little anger. "It's a pity he had to overintellectualize like that. He did such good work, and then he had to go and intellectualize it.

Jonathan Franzen
Think of the novel as lover: Let's stay home tonight and have a great time; just because you're touched where you want to be touched, it doesn't mean you're cheap; before a book can change you, you have to love it. Or the novelist as cook who prepares, as a gift to the reader, this many-course meal. Not just ice cream, but broccoli rabe as well.

Jonathan Franzen
This evening I begin a notebook. If anyone reads this, I trust they will forgive my overuse of "I". I can't stop it. I'm writing this.

Jonathan Franzen
I had a Viking sense of entitlement to whatever provisions I could plunder.

Jonathan Franzen
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.

Jonathan Franzen
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.

Jonathan Franzen
Remind me again what's wrong with Dave Matthews?" "Basically everything, except technical proficiency," Walter said. "Right." "But maybe especially the banality of the lyrics. 'Gotta be free, so free, yeah, yeah, yeah. Can't live without my freedom, yeah yeah.' That's pretty much every song.

Jonathan Franzen
But nothing disturbs the feeling of specialness like the presence of other human beings feeling identically special.

Jonathan Franzen