Top 200 Jonathan Franzen Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “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

154. “Our joint plan was to be poor and obscure and pure and take the world by surprise at a later date.”

— Jonathan Franzen

155. “Can you imagine going to bed with Kierkegaard? He’d never stop asking, ‘Can I do this to you? Is this okay?”

— Jonathan Franzen

156. “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

157. “I was about 13, in some ways, when I wrote the first book. Approximately 18 when I wrote the second.”

— Jonathan Franzen

158. “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

159. “Plato laments the decline of the oral tradition and the atrophy of memory which writing induces, I at the other end of the Age of the Written Word am impressed by the sturdiness and reliability of words on paper... The will to record indelibly, to set down stories in permanent words, seems to me akin to the conviction that we are larger than our biologies.”

— Jonathan Franzen

160. “You see a person with kids,” she said, “and you see how happy they are to be a parent, and you’re attracted to their happiness. Impossibility is attractive. You know, the safety of dead-ended things.”

— Jonathan Franzen

161. “I suspect that art has always had a particularly tenuous purchase on the American imagination because ours is a country to which so few terrible things have ever happened.”

— Jonathan Franzen

162. “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

163. “The man who ‘forgets’ his toothbrush in a woman’s house is a man who wants to come back.”

— Jonathan Franzen

164. “His life was much fuller than hers, and the breathing space this gave her was welcome. If she wanted his complete attention again, all she had to do was put his hands on her body; he was not undoglike himself in this regard.”

— Jonathan Franzen

165. “What he’d never understood about men in his position, in all the books he’d read and movies he’d seen about them, was clearer to him now: you couldn’t keep expecting wholehearted love without, at some point, requiting it. There was no credit to be earned for simply being good.”

— Jonathan Franzen

166. “Eager, perhaps, to repay the favor of listening, Sylvia nodded with encouragement. But suddenly she reminded Enid of Katharine Hepburn. In Hepburn’s eyes there had been a blank unconsciousness of privilege that made a once-poor woman like Enid want to kick her patrician shins with the hardest-toed pumps at her disposal. It would be a mistake, she felt, to confess anything to this woman.”

— Jonathan Franzen

167. “Yeah, well, we’re all grieving in our own way, obviously. It’s just I heard this crazy rumor about your having inherited twenty-two million dollars.” He tried to meet her eyes, but she’d turned away, squeezing her thumbs, fists balled. “Crazy, huh? But getting back to this lunch, let’s see, Mr. Aldren and whatever his name is, Tweedledum, they had steak, right? And Mr. Stoorhuys – ” He snapped his fingers. “Rabbit. Half a rabbit, grilled. Or what do you call it? Braised.”

— Jonathan Franzen

168. “The problem was money and the indignities of life without it. Every stroller, cell phone, Yankees cap, and SUV he saw was a torment. He wasn’t covetous, he wasn’t envious. But without money he was hardly a man.”

— Jonathan Franzen

169. “Kluger notes that these cases arguably amount to “personal injury claims in disguise,” and that the Supreme Court has ruled that federal cigarette-labeling laws are an effective shield against such claims. Logically, in other words, the states ought to be suing smokers, not cigarette makers. And perhaps smokers, in turn, ought to be suing Social Security and private pension funds for all the money they’ll save by dying early.”

— Jonathan Franzen

170. “The rage inside him was titanic. How to keep from exploding? What a relief exploding was.”

— Jonathan Franzen

171. “It seems not to occur to you that I might have had other very smart patients. The difference between them and me is that I’m a psychologist and they are not. I don’t have to be as smart as you to help you. I only have to be smart about one thing.”

— Jonathan Franzen

172. “Her heart was full and her senses were sharp, but her head felt liable to burst in the vacuum of her solitude.”

— Jonathan Franzen

173. “She’d been drinking jug wine steadily for four hours.”

— Jonathan Franzen

174. “After Gary had given the enlargements their sour baths, he raised the lights and discovered that both prints were webbed over with peculiar yellow blotches. He cursed a little, not so much because he cared about the prints as because he wanted to preserve his good spirits, his serotonin-rich mood, and to do this he needed... cooperation from the world of objects.”

— Jonathan Franzen

175. “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

176. “Essay’s roots are in literature, and literature at its best invites you to ask whether you might be somewhat wrong, maybe even entirely wrong, and to imagine why someone else might hate you.”

— Jonathan Franzen

177. “No one stays haunted by a person they’re not still in love with.”

— Jonathan Franzen

178. “I look at my father, who was in many ways an unhappy person, but who, not long before he got sick, said that the greatest source of satisfaction in his life had been going to work in the company of other workers.”

— Jonathan Franzen

179. “The following afternoon, alone in their room, and oppressed by not yet having made the promised call to Connie...”

— Jonathan Franzen

180. “Part of why kids like this scared me was that they seemed authentic.”

— Jonathan Franzen

181. “He knows how love blinds people to the truth about the one they are in love with.”

— Jonathan Franzen

182. “Among novelists I know, no one is more ambitious than I am.”

— Jonathan Franzen

183. “What made drugs perpetually so sexy was the opportunity to be other. Years after he’d figured out that pot only made him paranoid and sleepless, he still got hard-ons at the thought of smoking it. Still lusted for that jailbreak.”

— Jonathan Franzen

184. “The fantastic thing about Andreas is he knows the Internet is the greatest truth device ever. And what does it tell us? That everything in the society actually revolves about women, not men.”

— Jonathan Franzen

185. “I think the mission for the writer is to tell stories in a compelling way about the stuff that cannot be talked about, that cannot be gotten at with shallow media.”

— Jonathan Franzen

186. “I feel that working environmentalists are, in the main, happier than armchair environmentalists.”

— Jonathan Franzen

187. “Even then, when the hike was perfect, I would wonder, ‘Now what?’ And take a picture. Take another picture. Like a man with a photogenic girlfriend he didn’t love.”

— Jonathan Franzen

188. “Edith Wharton did have one potentially redeeming disadvantage: she wasn’t pretty.”

— Jonathan Franzen

189. “There’s something very wrong when a taste bud is still reporting strangeness five hours after you had a sweetened drink. Do you know that if you smoke crystal meth even once, your entire brain chemistry is altered for the rest of your life? That’s what stevia tastes like to me.” “I’m not sitting here puffing on a meth stem, if that’s what you’re trying to say.”

— Jonathan Franzen

190. “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

191. “Power, power, power: how could the world be organized around the struggle for a thing so lonely and oppressive in the having of it?”

— Jonathan Franzen

192. “I guess I was just trying to say that the Internet is good at satisfying needs from a distance. Male or female.”

— Jonathan Franzen

193. “I don’t personally like the e-readers they’ve come up with so far. I don’t fetishize books, but I do like that they’re solid and unchanging.”

— Jonathan Franzen

194. “As she left her parents’ neighborhood, the houses got newer and bigger and boxier. Through windows with no mullions or fake plastic mullions she could see luminous screens, some giant, some miniature. Evidently every hour of the year, including this one, was a good hour for staring at a screen.”

— Jonathan Franzen

195. “My practical intelligence said no, but my heart said yes.”

— Jonathan Franzen

196. “The mark of a legitimate revolution – the scientific, for example – was that it didn’t brag about its revolutionariness but simply occurred.”

— Jonathan Franzen

197. “Being dead’s only a problem if you know you’re dead, which you never do because you’re dead!”

— Jonathan Franzen

198. “The American middle-class appetite for illegal drugs provided the capital to build some of the most sophisticated and effective companies on earth.”

— Jonathan Franzen

199. “A candle is like a small sun, but the sun is like a large candle; examined closely, language turns out to operate through the lateral associations of metaphor, rather than through the vertical identifications of naming.”

— Jonathan Franzen

200. “Joey wished there were some different world he could belong to, some simpler world in which a good life could be had at nobody else’s expense.”

— Jonathan Franzen