Top 200 Jonathan Franzen Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “Don’t talk to me about hatred if you haven’t been married.”

— Jonathan Franzen

102. “The interesting people are always immoderate.”

— Jonathan Franzen

103. “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

104. “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

105. “A silence fell. Frogs in the night were calling, calling, calling.”

— Jonathan Franzen

106. “I wanted all of her and resented other boys for wanting any part of her.”

— Jonathan Franzen

107. “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

108. “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

109. “His problem consisted of a burning wish not to have done the things he’d done.”

— Jonathan Franzen

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

— Jonathan Franzen

111. “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

112. “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

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

116. “Only in a crowded, diverse place like New York, surrounded by strangeness, do I come home to myself.”

— Jonathan Franzen

117. “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

118. “He wasn’t constituted to hate himself subjectively, but he did hate the object he was in the world.”

— Jonathan Franzen

119. “His tiredness hurt so much it kept him awake.”

— Jonathan Franzen

120. “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

121. “The shame and disorder in his house were like the shame and disorder in his head.”

— Jonathan Franzen

122. “He felt like a helium balloon straining skyward on a slender string.”

— Jonathan Franzen

123. “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

124. “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

125. “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

126. “An ink bottle, which now seems impossibly quaint, was still thinkable as a symbol in 1970.”

— Jonathan Franzen

127. “Life a miserable contradiction, endless desire but limited supplies, your birth just a ticket to your death:.”

— Jonathan Franzen

128. “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

129. “My first hero was Thomas Edison, whose adult life had consisted entirely of free time.”

— Jonathan Franzen

130. “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

131. “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

132. “Just as the camera draws a stake through the heart of serious portraiture, television has killed the novel of social reportage.”

— Jonathan Franzen

133. “He had a happy canine way of seeking approval without seeming insecure.”

— Jonathan Franzen

134. “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

135. “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

136. “I had a Viking sense of entitlement to whatever provisions I could plunder.”

— Jonathan Franzen

137. “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

138. “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

139. “I’m telling you that I will be all right without you. Everything we have is temporary, the joy, the suffering, everything. I had the joy of experiencing your goodness for a very long time. It was enough. I have no right to ask for more.”

— Jonathan Franzen

140. “I was very young, and so I know,” my mother said. “I know what can happen.” “We’re not you,” Anabel said. “That’s what everyone thinks,” my mother said. “They think they’re not like other people. But then life teaches you some lessons.”

— Jonathan Franzen

141. “Secrets are the way you know you even have an inside.”

— Jonathan Franzen

142. “Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan.”

— Jonathan Franzen

143. “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

144. “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

145. “Wasn’t asking for a recipe supposed to be good coin of the feminine realm?”

— Jonathan Franzen

146. “It’s just a matter of writing the kind of book I enjoy reading. Something better be happening at the beginning, and then on every page after, or I get irritated.”

— Jonathan Franzen

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147. “He wanted this someone to see how much he hurt.”

— Jonathan Franzen

148. “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

149. “As soon as she hit the Send button, she had a spasm of remorse; her interval between action and remorse was diminishing so rapidly that soon she might be all remorse, unable to act at all; which might not be such a bad thing.”

— Jonathan Franzen

150. “I really enjoy doing both, but I didn’t write nonfiction until 1994.”

— Jonathan Franzen