Top 200 Jonathan Franzen Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “I was about 13, in some ways, when I wrote the first book. Approximately 18 when I wrote the second.”

— Jonathan Franzen

152. “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

153. “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

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

— Jonathan Franzen

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

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

— Jonathan Franzen

160. “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

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

— Jonathan Franzen

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

— Jonathan Franzen

163. “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

164. “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

165. “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

166. “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

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

— Jonathan Franzen

168. “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

169. “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

170. “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

171. “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

172. “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

173. “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

174. “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

175. “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

176. “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

177. “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

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

— Jonathan Franzen

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

— Jonathan Franzen

180. “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

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

— Jonathan Franzen

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

— Jonathan Franzen

183. “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

184. “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

185. “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

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

— Jonathan Franzen

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

— Jonathan Franzen

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

— Jonathan Franzen

189. “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

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

— Jonathan Franzen

191. “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

192. “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

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

— Jonathan Franzen

194. “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

195. “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

196. “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

197. “It’s not surprising to see in my own work, looking back, and in the work of some of my peers, an attention to family. It’s nice to write a book that does tend toward significance and meaning, and where else are you sure of finding it?”

— Jonathan Franzen

198. “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

199. “The thing about games is that you don’t want to look too closely at why you’re playing them. A great yawning emptiness underlies them, a close relative of the nothingness that lies beneath the surface of our busy lives.”

— Jonathan Franzen

200. “The New Regime even recycled the old Republic’s buzzwords, collective, collaborative. Axiomatic to both was that a new species of humanity was emerging.”

— Jonathan Franzen