Franzen Quotes & Sayings

Mephistopheles: Over! A stupid word. How so over? Over and pure nothing: completely the same thing! "It's over now!" What's that supposed to mean? It's as good as if it never was. — Jonathan Franzen

Life, in her experience, had a kind of velvet luster. You looked at yourself from one perspective and all you saw was weirdness. Move your head a little bit, though, and everything looked reasonably normal. — Jonathan Franzen

To me, the point of a novel is to take you to a still place. You can multitask with a lot of things, but you can't really multitask reading a book. — Jonathan Franzen

Mr. Franzen said he and Mr. Wallace, over years of letters and conversations about the ethical role of the novelist, had come to the joint conclusion that the purpose of writing fiction was "a way out of loneliness."
(NY Times article on the memorial service of David Foster Wallace.) — Jonathan Franzen

Fiction that isn't an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn't worth writing for anything but money. — Jonathan Franzen

You see more sitting still than chasing after. — Jonathan Franzen

The only decoration on the gray segments of her cubicle was a bumper sticker, AT LEAST THE WAR ON THE ENVIRONMENT IS GOING WELL. Her colleagues' cubicles were covered with photos — Jonathan Franzen

She'd visited the Continent five times on vacation and twice on business trips with Alfred, so about a dozen times altogether, and to friends planning tours of Spain or France she now liked to say, with a sigh, that she'd had her fill of the place. — Jonathan Franzen

young gentleman with whom she's been osculating on — Jonathan Franzen

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

Although in truth her passivity was calculated, because she knew passivity inflamed him. He had her, and to some extent she wanted to be had, like an animal: in a mute mutual privacy of violence. — Jonathan Franzen

She reshelved the sixpack and wrenched herself away to less compelling parts of the store, but it was hard to plan dinner when you felt like throwing up. She returned to the beer shelves like a bird repeating its song. The various beer cans had different decorations but all contained the identical weak low-end brew. It occurred to her to drive to Grand Rapids and buy some actual wine. It occurred to her to drive back to the house without buying anything at all. But then where would she be? A weariness set in as she stood and vacillated: a premonition that none of the possible impending outcomes would bring enough relief or pleasure to justify her current heart-racing wretchedness. She saw, in other words, what it meant to have become a deeply unhappy person. — Jonathan Franzen

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

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

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

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

It's something to be anxious about," Manley said, "if you want to be anxious about something. — Jonathan Franzen

Dad, Dad, Dad. What's wrong?" Alfred looked up at his son and into his eyes. He opened his mouth, but the only word he could produce was "I - " I - I have made mistakes - I am alone - I am wet - I want to die - I am sorry - I did my best - I love my children - I need your help - I want to die - "I can't be here," he said. — Jonathan Franzen

The deader the ball, the better it suited her purpose, which was to whack the shit out of it until she was physically exhausted. She thought this was quite possibly the most satisfying thing she'd ever done. — Jonathan Franzen

He [Wallace] sent a quick note to his friend [Franzen] explaining his behavior. "the bold fact is that I'm a little afraid of you right now,"[ ... ] "all I can tell you is that I may have been that [a worthy opponent] for you a couple/ three years ago, and maybe 16 months or tow or 5 or 10 years hence, but right now I am a pathetic and very confused man, a failed writer at 28, who is so jealous, so sickly searing envious of you and Vollmann and Mark Leyner and even David Fuckward Leavitt and any young man who is right now producing pages with which he can live and even approving them off some base-clause of conviction about the entrprise's meaning and end that I consider suicide a reasonable- if not at this point a desirable- option with respect to the whole wretched problem. — D.T. Max

I don't watch a huge amount of telly. I read a lot. I'm reading at the moment 'Freedom,' by Jonathan Franzen, a great big brick of a book, and I'm loving it. — Nick Clegg

He operated by Old World rules, the blurring of right and wrong into whatever you could get away with; — Jonathan Franzen

Nature even on the most local of scales made a mockery of information technology. Even augmented by tech, the human brain was paltry, infinitesimal, in comparison to the universe. — Jonathan Franzen

The cold breeze and the cold of Richard's Camel were mixing like joy and remorse. — Jonathan Franzen

My chances with moral vanity," Stephen interrupted, "when the alternative is — Jonathan Franzen

He may not have been exactly what she wanted in a man, but he was unsurpassable in providing the rabid fandom which, at the time, she needed even more than romance. — Jonathan Franzen

It was so easy to blame the mother. Life a miserable contradiction, endless desire but limited supplies, your birth just a ticket to your death: why not blame the person who'd stuck you with a life? OK, maybe it was unfair. But your mother could always blame her own mother, who herself could blame the mother, and so on back to the Garden. People had been blaming the mother forever, and most of them, Andreas was pretty sure, had mothers less blameworthy than his. — Jonathan Franzen

She told herself a story about a daughter in a family so hungry for a daughter that it would have eaten her alive if she hadn't run away. — Jonathan Franzen

Respectless and depraved, maybe. But happily respectless, happily depraved. — Jonathan Franzen

because, no matter how he'd come to hate her, he was also, even now, trying to impress her and win her praise, bringing her his Bertrand Russell papers as mother-flattering evidence of his outsize intellect, constructing his rhyme schemes. — Jonathan Franzen

He spoke of his lifelong crusade on behalf of fifty-watt lightbulbs. ("Sixty's too bright," he said, "and forty is too dim. — Jonathan Franzen

I feel that working environmentalists are, in the main, happier than armchair environmentalists. — Jonathan Franzen

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

I hate the concept of likeability - it gave us two terms of George Bush, whom a plurality of voters wanted to have a beer with, and Facebook. You'd unfriend a lot of people if you knew them as intimately and unsparingly as a good novel would. But not the ones you actually love. — Jonathan Franzen

It took hours to turn the clock back 30 seconds. — Jonathan Franzen

As one anthropologist pointed out to me, trauma is usually a group experience, so trauma recovery should be a group experience as well. But in our society it's not. — Jonathan Franzen

I love to read. And right now I'm on my last hundred pages of 'The Corrections' by Jonathan Franzen, and I really enjoyed it. His writing is just - he's one of those writers where you just go, 'There are people just meant to be novel writers.' — Candice Accola

Stevia does something funny to the chemistry of my mouth. There's no fooling a taste bud, in my experience. — Jonathan Franzen

The aim of the Internet and its associated technologies was to "liberate" humanity from the tasks - making things, learning things, remembering things - that had previously given meaning to life and thus had constituted life. Now it seemed as if the only task that meant anything was search-engine optimization. — Jonathan Franzen

Local politicians of color said children and tomorrow. They said digital and democracy and history. — Jonathan Franzen

I considered, quite seriously, strangling her to death while I fucked her and then throwing myself in front of the 8:11 bus. The idea was not without its logic and appeal. But there were the bus driver's feelings to consider ... — Jonathan Franzen

Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people. — Jonathan Franzen

I was a late child from my parents, so I grew up surrounded by people a lot older than me. I think even when I was 21, I felt like I was a 70-year-old man. — Jonathan Franzen

He felt like a helium balloon straining skyward on a slender string. — Jonathan Franzen

Patty believed that parents have a duty to teach their children how to recognize reality when they see it. — Jonathan Franzen

Every facet of Amarillo a testament to a nation of bad-ass firsts: first in prison population, first in meat consumption, first in operational strategic warheads, first in per-capita carbon emissions, first in line for the Rapture. Whether American liberals liked it or not, Amarillo was how the rest of the world saw their country. — Jonathan Franzen

And this of course, was the simplest definition of depression that he knew of: strongly disliking yourself. — Jonathan Franzen

He didn't understand what happened to him. He felt like a piece of paper that had once had coherent writing on it but had been through the wash. He felt roughened, bleached, and worn out along the fold lines. — Jonathan Franzen

Parents are programmed to want the best for their kids, regardless of what they get in return. That's what love is supposed to be like, right? But in fact, if you think about it, that's kind of a strange belief. Given what we know about the way people really are. Selfish and shortsighted and egotistical and needy. Why should being a parent, in and of itself, somehow confer superior-personhood on everybody who tries it? Obviously it doesn't. — Jonathan Franzen

Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting. — Jonathan Franzen

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

Deploring other people
their lack of perfection
had always been our sport. — Jonathan Franzen

I hate that word dysfunction. — Jonathan Franzen

Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan. — Jonathan Franzen

He couldn't figure out if she was immensely well adjusted or seriously messed up. — Jonathan Franzen

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

A child who's got the habit will start reading under the covers with a flashlight," she said. "If the parents are smart, they'll forbid the child to do this, and thereby encourage her. Otherwise she'll find a peer who also has the habit, and the two of them will keep it a secret between them. — Jonathan Franzen

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

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

The figure of my father looms large in my imagination. — Jonathan Franzen

AT LEAST THE WAR ON THE ENVIRONMENT IS GOING WELL. — Jonathan Franzen

In the kitchen Enid dredged the Promethean meat in flour and laid it in a Westinghouse electric pan large enough to fry nine eggs in ticktacktoe formation. — Jonathan Franzen

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

He blamed her both for liking his mother and for — Jonathan Franzen

He was a sleaze, a nobody, a former graduate student of English studies. — Jonathan Franzen

With whiskey, the capillary bloom was more diffusely rosy than with gin and less purple than with wine. Every university dinner party was a study in blooms. — Jonathan Franzen

She had all day every day to figure out some decent and satisfying way to live, and yet all she ever seemed to get for all her choices and all her freedom was more miserable. The autobiographer is almost forced to the conclusion that she pitied herself for being so free. — Jonathan Franzen

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

In the old days, Christmas lights had come in short strings that were wired serially. If a single bulb burned out or even just loosened in its socket, the circuit was broken and the entire string went dark. One of the season's rituals for Gary and Chip had been to tighten each little brass-footed bulb in a darkened string and then, if this didn't work, to replace each bulb in turn until the dead culprit was found. (What joy the boys had taken in the resurrection of a string!) By the time Denise was old enough to help with the lights, the technology had advanced. The wiring was parallel, and the bulbs had snap-in plastic bases. A single faulty light didn't affect the rest of the community but identified itself instantly for instant replacement ... — Jonathan Franzen

Don't talk to me about hatred if you haven't been married. — Jonathan Franzen

She was like a bank too big in her mother's economy to fail, — Jonathan Franzen

I'm starting to think paradise isn't eternal contentment. It's more like there's something eternal about feeling contented. There's no such thing as eternal life, because you're never going to outrun time, but you can still escape time if you're contented, because then time doesn't matter. — Jonathan Franzen

Our culture attaches too much importance to feelings, he says it's out of control, it's not computers that are making everything virtual, it's mental health. Everyone's trying to correct their thoughts and improve their feelings and work on their relationships and parenting skills instead of just getting married and raising children like they used to, — Jonathan Franzen

Nell Zink is a writer of extraordinary talent and range. Her work insistently raises the possibility that the world is larger and stranger than the world you think you know. — Jonathan Franzen

There was such a relative paucity of smells in California that the interconnectedness of all possible smells was not apparent. She — Jonathan Franzen

My first hero was Thomas Edison, whose adult life had consisted entirely of free time. — Jonathan Franzen

He became another data point in the American experiment of self-government, an experiment statistically skewed from the outset, because it wasn't the people with sociable genes who fled the crowded Old World for the new continent; it was the people who didn't get along well with others. — Jonathan Franzen

If you want to have friends, you have to remember that nobody's perfect. — Jonathan Franzen

He and his wife loved each other and brought each other daily pain. Everything else he was doing in his life, even his longing for Lalitha, amounted to little more than flight from circumstance. He and Patty couldn't live together and couldn't imagine living apart. Each time he thought they'd reached the unbearable breaking point, it turned out that there was still further they could go without breaking. — Jonathan Franzen

She had to tell him, while she still had time, how wrong he'd been and how right she'd been. How wrong not to love her more, how wrong not to cherish her and have sex at every opportunity, how wrong not to trust her financial instincts, how wrong to have spent so much time at work and so little with the children, how wrong to have been so negative, how wrong to have been gloomy, how wrong to have run away from life, how wrong to have said no, again and again, instead of yes: she had to tell him all of this, every single day. — Jonathan Franzen

She pondered the arrangements of the paintings on a wall like a writer pondered commas. — Jonathan Franzen

The reason this system can't be overthrown in this country," Walter said, "is all about freedom. The reason the free market in Europe is tempered by socialism is that they're not so hung up on personal liberties there. They also have lower population growth rates, despite comparable income levels. The Europans are all-around more rational, basically. And the conversation about rights in this country isn't rational. It's taking place on the level of emotion, and class resentments, which is why the right is so good at exploiting it. — Jonathan Franzen

The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage. — Jonathan Franzen

Katz had read extensively in popular sociobiology, and his understanding of the depressive personality type and its seemingly perverse persistence in the human gene pool was that depression was successful adaptation to ceaseless pain and hardship. Pessimism, feelings of worthlessness and lack of entitlement, inability to derive satisfaction from pleasure, a tormenting awareness of the world's general crappiness: for Katz Jewish paternal forebears, who'd been driven from shtetl to shtetl by implacable anti-Semites, as for the old Angles and Saxons on his mother's side, who'd labored to grow rye and barley in the poor soils and short summers of northern Europe, feeling bad all the time and expecting the worse had been natural ways of equilibriating themselves with the lousiness of their circumstances. Few things gratified depressives, after all, more than really bad news. This obviously wasn't an optimal way to live, but it had its evolutionary advantages. — Jonathan Franzen

Alfred believed that the real and the true were a minority that the world was bent on exterminating. — Jonathan Franzen

Two empty hours were a sinus in which infections bred. — Jonathan Franzen

How well aware the body was of what it wanted. How quickly it gleaned the news it could use. — Jonathan Franzen

I once overheard a young white man at a book festival say to his friend, "Have you read the new Kureishi? Same old thing - loads of Indian people." To which you want to reply, "Have you read the new Franzen? Same old thing - loads of white people. — Zadie Smith

I wanted all of her and resented other boys for wanting any part of her. — Jonathan Franzen

I think there's a real hunger for people speaking truth to power. Like, there's a little minority now that's saying you sounded like an asshole and a whiner. But that's just the player-hating fringe. I wouldn't worry about it. — Jonathan Franzen

Around her ribs and waist were curves of the kind that wind carves in snowdrifts. — Jonathan Franzen

There is, after all, a kind of happiness in unhappiness, if it's the right unhappiness. — Jonathan Franzen

Then she waited, with parted lips and a saucy challenge in her eyes, to see how her presence
the drama of being her
was registering. In the way of such chicks, she seemed convinced of the originality of her provocation. — Jonathan Franzen

For three years, all through junior high, my social death was grossly overdetermined. I had a large vocabulary, a giddily squeaking voice, horn-rimmed glasses, poor arm strength, too-obvious approval from my teachers, irresistible urges to shout unfunny puns, a near-eidetic acquaintance with J.R.R. Tolkien, a big chemistry lab in my basement, a penchant for intimately insulting any unfamiliar girl unwise enough to speak to me, and so on. — Jonathan Franzen

Believe me,' [ ... ] 'I would know about it. That's the difference between me and your girlfriend. I am the jealous type. I am the Spanish Inquisition when it comes to being fucked around on. No quarter will be given. — Jonathan Franzen

This was what was keeping me awake at night,' Walter said. 'This fragmentation. Because it's the same problem everywhere. It's like the internet, or cable TV- there's never any center, there's no communal agreement, there's just a trillion little bits of distracting noise. We can never sit down and have any kind of sustained conversation, it's all just cheap trash and shitty development. All the real things, the authentic things, the honest things are dying off. Intellectually and culturally, we just bounce around like random billiard balls, reacting to the latest random stimuli. — Jonathan Franzen

Sex with a squirrel who had exciting breasts beneath her little-kid pajamas was not without its appeal, — Jonathan Franzen

If you were looking aside and mentally adding up the hours until the execution of a young killer, all that registered was something dark flashing by. But if you happened to be gazing directly at the window in question and you happened as well to be feeling unprecedentedly calm, four-tenths of a second was more than enough time to identify the falling object as your husband of forty-seven years. — Jonathan Franzen

You thought you knew what food was, you thought it was elemental. You forgot how much restaurant there was in restaurant food and how much home was in homemade. — Jonathan Franzen

Each new thing he encountered in life impelled him in a direction that fully convinced him of its rightness, but then the next new thing loomed up and impelled him in the opposite direction, which also felt right. There was no controlling narrative: he seemed to himself a purely reactive pinball in a game whose only object was to stay alive for staying alive's sake. — Jonathan Franzen