Top 200 Jonathan Franzen Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “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

204. “I feel as if I’m clearly part of a trend among writers who take themselves seriously – and I confess to taking myself as seriously as the next writer.”

— Jonathan Franzen

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

— Jonathan Franzen

206. “They’re all about being the special one, the chosen one. ‘Only you can save the world from Evil.’ That kind of thing. And never mind that specialness stops meaning anything when every kid is special. I remember watching those movies and thinking about all the unspecial characters in the chorus or whatever. The people just doing the hard work of belonging to society. They’re the ones my heart really goes out to. The movie should be about them.”

— Jonathan Franzen

207. “How well aware the body was of what it wanted. How quickly it gleaned the news it could use.”

— Jonathan Franzen

208. “It was this other side of Avery – the fact that he so visibly had an other side – that was helping me finally understand all three of the dimensions in Kafka: that a man could be a sweet, sympathetic, comically needy victim and a lascivious, self-aggrandizing, grudge-bearing bore, and also, crucially, a third thing: a flickering consciousness, a simultaneity of culpable urge and poignant self-reproach, a person in process.”

— Jonathan Franzen

209. “Deploring other people – their lack of perfection – had always been our sport.”

— Jonathan Franzen

210. “The odd truth about Alfred was that love, for him, was a matter not of approaching but of keeping away.”

— Jonathan Franzen

211. “Well, and that’s what really counts, isn’t it? I’ve become one of those women who put a ton of work into looking OK. If I can just go on and make a beautiful corpse, I’ll have the whole problem pretty well licked.”

— Jonathan Franzen

212. “Impossibility is attractive.”

— Jonathan Franzen

213. “Sounded to me like he had a pretty good idea what he was saying,” Van replied, with surprisingly little anger. “It’s a pity he had to overintellectualize like that. He did such good work, and then he had to go and intellectualize it.”

— Jonathan Franzen

214. “The country that minutely followed every phony turn of American Idol while the world went up in flames seemed to Walter fully deserving of whatever nightmare future awaited it. He.”

— Jonathan Franzen

215. “Sleep was the ideally work-compatible girl he ought to have married in the first place. Perfectly submissive, infinitely forgiving, and so respectable you could take her to church.”

— Jonathan Franzen

216. “The guiding principle of Martin’s personality, the sum of his interior existence, was the desire to be left alone. If all those years he’d sought attention, even novelty, and if he still relished them, then that was because attention proved him different and solitude begins in difference.”

— Jonathan Franzen

217. “It was clear to everyone that day, and in the months that followed, that Patty’s greatest warming influence was on Walter himself. Now, instead of speeding by his neighbors in his angry Prius, he stopped to lower his window and say hello. On weekends, he brought Patty over to the patch of clear ice that the neighborhood kids maintained for hockey and instructed her in skating, which, in a remarkably short time, she became rather good at.”

— Jonathan Franzen

218. “Perhaps the soul was one of those tools built to do exactly one specific task, to know that I am I, and was mutable with respect to all other forms of knowledge?”

— Jonathan Franzen

219. “I’m the fat little humiliation he’s married to.”

— Jonathan Franzen

220. “Plus. she’d already been downstairs for so long that it would be unpleasant to go up and beg Jason for further patience, and her life was already so fraught with unpleasantnesses that she’d adopted the strategy of delaying encounters with them as long as possible, even when the delay made it likely that they would be even more unpleasant when she did encounter them.”

— Jonathan Franzen

221. “And so began the remainder of her life.”

— Jonathan Franzen

222. “It was unfair to have enjoyed her body when she was young and then burdened her with children and a thousand duties, only to now feel miserable whenever he had to venture into public with her and her sorry hair, her unavailing makeup, her seemingly self-spiting choice of dress. He pitied her for the unfairness; he felt guilty. But he couldn’t help blaming her, too, because her unattractiveness advertised unhappiness.”

— Jonathan Franzen

223. “Outside, the middle class was disappearing faster than the icecaps, xenophobes were winning elections or stocking up on assault rifles, warring tribes were butchering each other religiously, but inside, disruptive new technologies were rendering traditional politics obsolete.”

— Jonathan Franzen

224. “Time stops for the duration of a cigarette: when you’re smoking, you’re acutely present to yourself; you step outside the unconscious rush of life. This is why the condemned are allowed a final cigarette... it’s a lot easier to leave the world if you’re certain that you have really been in it.”

— Jonathan Franzen

225. “It was strange that self-pity wasn’t on the list of deadly sins; none was deadlier.”

— Jonathan Franzen

226. “The dream of a novel was more resilient than other kinds of dreaming. It could be interrupted in mid-sentence and snapped back into later.”

— Jonathan Franzen

227. “He cried for a long time. I stroked his head and held him close. If he’d been a woman, I would have kissed his hair. But strict limits to intimacy are straight man’s burden.”

— Jonathan Franzen

228. “And when the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight – isn’t that a strange thing? That absolutely nothing changes except that you see things differently and you’re less fearful and less anxious and generally stronger as a result: isn’t it amazing that a completely invisible thing in your head can feel realer than anything you’ve experienced before?”

— Jonathan Franzen

229. “Yes, but that’s because you’re not poor. When you’re poor, things just happen to you. You feel like you can’t control anything. You’re completely at God’s mercy. That’s why Jesus tells us that the poor are blessed – because having nothing brings you closer to God.” “That woman didn’t strike me as being especially close to God.”

— Jonathan Franzen

230. “There was a kind of liberation in jettisoning all thought of being a good person.”

— Jonathan Franzen

231. “You have some fine qualities, but imagination was never one of them.”

— Jonathan Franzen

232. “Did his soul change every time it achieved a new insight? The very definition of a soul was immutability. Perhaps the root of his confusion was the conflation of soul and knowledge. Perhaps the soul was one of those tools built to do exactly one specific task, to know that I am I, and was mutable with respect to all other forms of knowledge?”

— Jonathan Franzen

233. “The perfect gift for the man who had everything was a quarter-ounce bottle of feminism.”

— Jonathan Franzen

234. “It occurred to her that the Perry in her head had been nothing but a sentimental projection, extrapolated from the little boy he’d been. She didn’t know the real Perry any more than Russ knew the real her. “How.”

— Jonathan Franzen

235. “Clem couldn’t stand to be in the same room with him. He was giving up his student deferment to show his father what a strong man did.”

— Jonathan Franzen

236. “He was realizing too late that old people weren’t entirely stupid.”

— Jonathan Franzen

237. “Evil had pursued her all her life, and now the world was exploding with the color of it, and nowhere was there refuge.”

— Jonathan Franzen

238. “Marion stepped up to the counter and surveyed the candy-bar display with militant loathing.”

— Jonathan Franzen

239. “A noseful of Cottrell ought to have sobered her, but somehow everything was interchangeable.”

— Jonathan Franzen

240. “It’s like there are these words, they’re out there in the world, and you start wondering what it would be like to say them. Words have their own power – they create the feeling, just by the fact of your saying them.”

— Jonathan Franzen

241. “The whole notion of coolness was puerile.”

— Jonathan Franzen

242. “In the hush of the emptied campus, he could faintly hear the mightiness of Illinois, the rumble of a freight train, the moan of eighteen-wheelers, coal transported from the south, car parts from the north, fattened livestock and staggering corn yields from the middle, all roads leading to the broad-shouldered city on the lake.”

— Jonathan Franzen

243. “I think badness is the fundamental condition of humanity.”

— Jonathan Franzen

244. “He wondered if an action, to qualify as authentically good, needed not only to be untainted by self-interest but also to bring no pleasure of any kind.”

— Jonathan Franzen

245. “Pip wondered what the secret was of being different in a way that attracted people, as opposed to her own way.”

— Jonathan Franzen

246. “According to Scripture, earthly life was but a moment, but the moment seemed spacious when he was with her.”

— Jonathan Franzen

247. “Your father doesn’t look to our Savior but to what other men think of him. He preaches love but holds a grudge like no mans business.”

— Jonathan Franzen

248. “She’d seen enough of socialism to foresee its ultimate failure, she knew the Soviets to be thieves, rapists, and murderers, and she never got over the shock of discovering that my father was rich only in comparison to Jena, only the way most Americans were rich.”

— Jonathan Franzen