Top 100

Top 200 Jonathan Franzen Quotes (2024 Update)
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Jonathan Franzen Quote: “When a smoker says he wants to quit but can’t, what he’s really saying is, “I want to quit but I want even more not to suffer the agony of withdrawal.” To argue otherwise is to jettison any lingering notion of personal responsibility.”
Jonathan Franzen Quote: “I wanted all of her and resented other boys for wanting any part of her.”
Jonathan Franzen Quote: “His problem consisted of a burning wish not to have done the things he’d done.”
Jonathan Franzen Quote: “There’s the imperative to keep secrets, and the imperative to have them known. How do you know that you’re a person, distinct from other people? By keeping certain things to yourself.”
Jonathan Franzen Quote: “His tiredness hurt so much it kept him awake.”
Jonathan Franzen Quote: “What happened in the virtual world, where beauty existed for the purpose of being hated and besmirched, was more compelling than what happened in the real world, where beauty seemed to have no purpose at all.”
Jonathan Franzen Quote: “The shame and disorder in his house were like the shame and disorder in his head.”
Jonathan Franzen Quote: “Only in a crowded, diverse place like New York, surrounded by strangeness, do I come home to myself.”
Jonathan Franzen Quote: “And maybe this was what craziness was: an emergency valve to relieve the pressure of unbearable anxiety.”
Jonathan Franzen Quote: “When I see an actress or actor drag deeply in a movie, I imagine the pyrenes and phenols ravaging the tender epithelial cells and hardworking cilia of their bronchi, the monoxide and cyanide binding to their hemoglobin, the heaving and straining of their chemically panicked hearts.”
Jonathan Franzen Quote: “Only once, and only because I was very young, could I have merged my identity with another person’s, and singularities like this are where you find eternity.”
Jonathan Franzen Quote: “He wasn’t constituted to hate himself subjectively, but he did hate the object he was in the world.”
Jonathan Franzen Quote: “It was a way of recognizing places of enchantment: people falling asleep like this.”
Jonathan Franzen Quote: “If you’re interested in how people behave, if you’re interested in the way they talk about themselves, the way the conceive of themselves, it’s very hard to ignore drugs nowadays, because that is so much part of the conversation.”
Jonathan Franzen Quote: “Over the balustrade I could see the dark trees of Webster Groves and the more distant TV-tower lights that marked the boundaries of my childhood. A night wind coming across the football practice field carried the smell of thawed winter earth, the great sorrowful world-smell of being alive beneath a sky.”
Jonathan Franzen Quote: “What lived on-in me- was the discomfort of how completely I’d outgrown the novel I’d once been so happy to live in.”
Jonathan Franzen Quote: “An ink bottle, which now seems impossibly quaint, was still thinkable as a symbol in 1970.”
Jonathan Franzen Quote: “Simply being a “social isolate” as a child does not, however, doom you to bad breath and poor party skills as an adult. In fact, it can make you hypersocial. It’s just that at some point you’ll begin to feel a gnawing, almost remorseful need to be alone and do some reading – to reconnect to that community.”
Jonathan Franzen Quote: “I had a Viking sense of entitlement to whatever provisions I could plunder.”
Jonathan Franzen Quote: “My first hero was Thomas Edison, whose adult life had consisted entirely of free time.”
Jonathan Franzen Quote: “So many Jonathans. A plague of literary Jonathans. If you read only the New York Times Book Review, you’d think it was the most common male name in America. Synonymous with talent, greatness. Ambition, vitality.”
Jonathan Franzen Quote: “You encountered a misery near the end of the day and it took a while to gauge its full extent. Some miseries had sharp curvature and could be negotiated readily. Others had almost no curvature and you knew you’d be spending hours turning the corner. Great whopping-big planet-sized miseries.”
Jonathan Franzen Quote: “Love turned out to be soul-crippling, stomach-turning, weirdly claustrophobic: a sense of endlessness bottled up inside him, endless weight, endless potential, with only the small outlet of a shivering pale girl in a bad rain jacket to escape through. Touching her was the farthest thing from his mind. The impulse was to throw himself at her feet.”
Jonathan Franzen Quote: “He had a happy canine way of seeking approval without seeming insecure.”
Jonathan Franzen Quote: “And did the distress I was feeling derive from some internal sickness of the soul, or was it imposed on me by the sickness of society? That someone besides me had suffered from these ambiguities and had seen light on their far side... that I could find company and consolation and hope in an object pulled almost at random from a bookshelf – felt akin to an instance of religious grace.”
Jonathan Franzen Quote: “I said it was OK, I said I loved her, I said not to worry about me. Her breathing became slower and more labored, and then just past noon, it stopped altogether. I laid my cheek on her chest and held her for a long time, not thinking anything, just being an animal that had lost its mother.”
Jonathan Franzen Quote: “He felt like a helium balloon straining skyward on a slender string.”
Jonathan Franzen Quote: “Just as the camera draws a stake through the heart of serious portraiture, television has killed the novel of social reportage.”
Jonathan Franzen Quote: “An odd thing about beauty, however, is that it’s absence tends not to arouse our sympathy as much as other forms of privation do.”
Jonathan Franzen Quote: “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 Quote: “She has embarrassingly inquired, of her children, whether there’s a woman in his life, and has rejoiced at hearing no. Not because she doesn’t want him to be happy, not because she has any right or even much inclination to be jealous anymore, but because it means there’s some shadow of a chance that he still thinks, as she does more than ever, that they were not just the worst thing that ever happened to each other, they were also the best thing.”
Jonathan Franzen Quote: “Fiction, I believed, was the transmutation of experiential dross into linguistic gold. Fiction meant taking up whatever the world had abandoned by the road and making something beautiful out of it.”
Jonathan Franzen Quote: “A silence fell. Frogs in the night were calling, calling, calling.”
Jonathan Franzen Quote: “She’d listened to a lot of these utopian discussions, and it was somehow comforting that Stephen and his friends could never quite work all the kinks out of their plan; that the world was as obstinately unfixable as her life was.”
Jonathan Franzen Quote: “The interesting people are always immoderate.”
Jonathan Franzen Quote: “Secrets are the way you know you even have an inside.”
Jonathan Franzen Quote: “He had shining dark eyes and an oboe voice and mink-soft hair and could seem, even to Gary, more sentient animal than little boy.”
Jonathan Franzen Quote: “What happens to the people who became writers because yakking and tweeting and bragging felt to them like intolerably shallow forms of social engagement? What happens to the people who want to communicate in depth, individual to individual, in the quiet and permanence of the printed word, and who were shaped by their love of writers who wrote when publication still assured some kind of quality control and literary reputations were more than a matter of self-promotional decibel levels?”
Jonathan Franzen Quote: “I really enjoy doing both, but I didn’t write nonfiction until 1994.”
Jonathan Franzen Quote: “I used to think it was hard to write, and I still find the process more or less unpleasant, but if I know what I’m doing it rattles along, then the rewrite whips it into shape rather quickly.”
Jonathan Franzen Quote: “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 Quote: “Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan.”
Jonathan Franzen Quote: “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...”
Jonathan Franzen Quote: “Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular. But the realism is merely a mask for depression’s actual essence, which is an overwhelming estrangement from humanity. The more persuaded you are of your unique access to the rottenness, the more afraid you become of engaging with the world; and the less you engage with the world, the more perfidiously happy-faced the rest of humanity seems for continuing to engage with it.”
Jonathan Franzen Quote: “He wanted this someone to see how much he hurt.”
Jonathan Franzen Quote: “We girls are supposed to at least have these amazing sexual powers, but in my recent experience this is just a lie told by men to make them feel better about having ALL the power.”
Jonathan Franzen Quote: “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 Quote: “She didn’t need to see more people, she took money from hundreds of people at the bakery, men who stared at her indecently, old women who tweezed coins from cloth pouches as if picking a nose with thumb and finger.”
Jonathan Franzen Quote: “Can you imagine going to bed with Kierkegaard? He’d never stop asking, ‘Can I do this to you? Is this okay?”
Jonathan Franzen Quote: “Wasn’t asking for a recipe supposed to be good coin of the feminine realm?”
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