Jonathan Franzen Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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

Jonathan Franzen
Everything he did was at least partial and often total bullshit (402).

Jonathan Franzen
He had a happy canine way of seeking approval without seeming insecure.

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

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

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

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

Jonathan Franzen
Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.

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

Jonathan Franzen
It was a way of recognizing places of enchantment: people falling asleep like this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jonathan Franzen
'I'm not the person to ask about what's normal,' Denise answered. 'I've mainly seen normal in the rearview mirror.'

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

Jonathan Franzen
She felt that nothing could kill her hope now, nothing. She was seventy-five and she was going to make some changes in her life.

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

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
Birds were like dinosaurs' better selves. They had short lives and long summers. We all should be so lucky as to leave behind such heirs.

Jonathan Franzen
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.

Jonathan Franzen
The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage.

Jonathan Franzen
I can't stomach any kind of notion that serious fiction is good for us, because I don't believe that everything that's wrong with the world has a cure.

Jonathan Franzen
A novel represents a compact between the writer and the reader, with the writer providing words out of which the reader creates a pleasurable experience.

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
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.

Jonathan Franzen