Top 200 Jonathan Franzen Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Patty knew, in her heart, that he was wrong in his impression of her. And the mistake she went to go on to make, the really big life mistake, was to go along with Walter’s version of her in spite of knowing that it wasn’t right. He seemed so certain of her goodness that eventually he wore her down.”

— Jonathan Franzen

52. “The aim of the Internet and its associated technologies was to “liberate” humanity from the tasks – making things, learning things, remembering things – that had previously given meaning to life and thus had constituted life. Now it seemed as if the only task that meant anything was search-engine optimization.”

— Jonathan Franzen

53. “To paraphrase Frank Zappa, she’d thought it was a man she wanted, but instead it was a muffin.”

— Jonathan Franzen

54. “When I finally gave up any hope of doing anything representative of the American family, I actually seemed to have tapped into other people’s weirdness in that way.”

— Jonathan Franzen

55. “If you want to have friends, you have to remember that nobody’s perfect.”

— Jonathan Franzen

56. “Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance.”

— Jonathan Franzen

57. “If you look at the New Testament, it’s a gospel of love. Yes, there’s talk of judgement and there’s talk of heaven and there’s talk of people not getting into heaven, but it doesn’t seem to me that the fundamental message of the gospels was one of guilt and retribution so much as love.”

— Jonathan Franzen

58. “Today’s Baudelaires are hip-hop artists.”

— Jonathan Franzen

59. “The figure of my father looms large in my imagination.”

— Jonathan Franzen

60. “Nell Zink is a writer of extraordinary talent and range. Her work insistently raises the possibility that the world is larger and stranger than the world you think you know.”

— Jonathan Franzen

61. “I admire your capacity for admiring.”

— Jonathan Franzen

62. “The world was ending then, it’s ending still, and I’m happy to belong to it again.”

— Jonathan Franzen

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

— Jonathan Franzen

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

— Jonathan Franzen

65. “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.”

— Jonathan Franzen

66. “Good novels are produced by people who voluntarily isolate themselves and go deep, and report from the depths on what they find.”

— Jonathan Franzen

67. “I was a late child from my parents, so I grew up surrounded by people a lot older than me. I think even when I was 21, I felt like I was a 70-year-old man.”

— Jonathan Franzen

68. “Expecting a novel to bear the weight of our whole disturbed society – to help solve our contemporary problems – seems to me a peculiarly American delusion. To write sentences of such authenticity that refuge can be taken in them: isn’t this enough? Isn’t it a lot?”

— Jonathan Franzen

69. “Nothing got inside the head without becoming pictures.”

— Jonathan Franzen

70. “I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.”

— Jonathan Franzen

71. “In a decadent society people can slowly drift or slowly be drawn by the culture of commerce into yearning for violence. Maybe people have a deep congenital awareness that no civilization lasts forever, that the most peaceful prosperity will someday have to end, or maybe it’s just human nature.”

— Jonathan Franzen

72. “Have you ever been tempted to leave a thought unspoken?” “I’m a writer, baby. Voicing thought is what I’m poorly paid and uncharitably reviewed for.”

— Jonathan Franzen

73. “Two empty hours were a sinus in which infections bred.”

— Jonathan Franzen

74. “And if you sat at the dinner table long enough, whether in punishment or in refusal or simply in boredom, you never stopped sitting there. Some part of you sat there all your life.”

— Jonathan Franzen

75. “Fiction that isn’t an author’s personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn’t worth writing for anything but money.”

— Jonathan Franzen

76. “Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.”

— Jonathan Franzen

77. “We may freak out globally, but we suffer locally.”

— Jonathan Franzen

78. “It’s like having one red sock in a load of white laundry. One red sock, and nothing is ever white again.”

— Jonathan Franzen

79. “It’sthe fate of most Ping-Pong tables in home basements eventually to serve the ends of other, more desperate games.”

— Jonathan Franzen

80. “The Mekons were kind of like the background music of my life.”

— Jonathan Franzen

81. “If time was infinite, then three seconds and three years represented the same infinitely small fraction of it. And so, if inflicting three years of fear and suffering was wrong, as everyone would agree, then inflicting three seconds of it was no less wrong. He caught a fleeting glimpse of God in the math here, in the infinitesimal duration of a life.”

— Jonathan Franzen

82. “The tone of the new ones, in their TED Talks, in PowerPointed product launches, in testimony to parliaments and congresses, in utopianly titled books, was a smarmy syrup of convenient conviction and personal surrender that he remembered well from the Republic. He.”

— Jonathan Franzen

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

— Jonathan Franzen

84. “You need closeness with other people. And how is closeness built? By sharing secrets. Colleen.”

— Jonathan Franzen

85. “Whatever else happened, she wanted a dog in her life.”

— Jonathan Franzen

86. “When I was younger, the main struggle was to be a ‘good writer.’ Now I more or less take my writing abilities for granted, although this doesn’t mean I always write well.”

— Jonathan Franzen

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

— Jonathan Franzen

88. “Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are. And this is why love, as I understand it, is always specific. Trying to love all of humanity may be a worthy endeavor, but, in a funny way, it keeps the focus on the self, on the self’s own moral or spiritual well-being. Whereas, to love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.”

— Jonathan Franzen

89. “This wasn’t the person he’d thought he was, or would have chosen to be if he’d been free to choose, but there was something comforting and liberating about being an actual definite someone, rather than a collection of contradictory potential someones.”

— Jonathan Franzen

90. “I hate that word dysfunction.”

— Jonathan Franzen

91. “Don’t talk to me about hatred if you haven’t been married.”

— Jonathan Franzen

92. “I’m starting to think paradise isn’t eternal contentment. It’s more like there’s something eternal about feeling contented. There’s no such thing as eternal life, because you’re never going to outrun time, but you can still escape time if you’re contented, because then time doesn’t matter.”

— Jonathan Franzen

93. “Sometimes I think my life is nothing but one long process of bodily betrayal.”

— Jonathan Franzen

94. “It seems to me self-evident that if you have a life, things happen in it, and certain things do change; certain things end. People you know die.”

— Jonathan Franzen

95. “He was a sleaze, a nobody, a former graduate student of English studies.”

— Jonathan Franzen

96. “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

97. “To me, the point of a novel is to take you to a still place. You can multitask with a lot of things, but you can’t really multitask reading a book.”

— Jonathan Franzen

98. “Everyone thinks they have strict limits,” she said, “until they cross them.”

— Jonathan Franzen

99. “Only silence was acceptable in its potential to be endless.”

— Jonathan Franzen

100. “As with all forms of liberation, of which the liberation of women is only one example, it is easy to suppose in a time of freedom that the darker days of repression can never come again.”

— Jonathan Franzen