Jonathan Franzen Quotes: top 100 famous quotes about Jonathan Franzen

Jonathan Franzen Quotes & Sayings

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Nowadays there is really only one habit of highly effective people: Don't fall behind with email. — Jonathan Franzen

Stupidity mistook itself for intelligence, whereas intelligence knew its own stupidity. — Jonathan Franzen

It didn't feel so bad to be an orphan. It felt like the first day of a long vacation, a day as empty as the January sky was clear and sunny. — Jonathan Franzen

Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude. — Jonathan Franzen

His resentment of his wife, Caroline, was moderate and well contained. — Jonathan Franzen

It's very liberating for me to realize that I don't have to step up to the plate with a plot that involves the U.N. Security Council. — Jonathan Franzen

He wanted this someone to see how much he hurt. — Jonathan Franzen

You need closeness with other people. And how is closeness built? By sharing secrets. Colleen — Jonathan Franzen

Seriously, the world is changing so quickly that if you had any more than 80 years of change I dont see how you could stand it psychologically. — Jonathan Franzen

He'd lost track of what he wanted, and since who a person was what a person wanted, you could say that he'd lost track of himself. — Jonathan Franzen

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

Only silence was acceptable in its potential to be endless. — Jonathan Franzen

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

The interesting people are always immoderate. — Jonathan Franzen

She'd been drinking jug wine steadily for four hours. — Jonathan Franzen

We may freak out globally, but we suffer locally. — Jonathan Franzen

There's hardly anybody who doesn't hate somebody now, and nobody at all whom somebody doesn't hate. — Jonathan Franzen

I hate that word dysfunction. — Jonathan Franzen

She felt that nothing could kill her hope now, nothing. She was seventy-five and she was going to make some changes in her life. — Jonathan Franzen

The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator. — Jonathan Franzen

I'm just happy you're home safely. — Jonathan Franzen

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

He had a happy canine way of seeking approval without seeming insecure. — Jonathan Franzen

The mark of a legitimate revolution - the scientific, for example - was that it didn't brag about its revolutionariness but simply occurred. — Jonathan Franzen

Everyone thinks they have strict limits," she said, "until they cross them. — 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

She felt as if, while working and sleeping and working and sleeping, she'd aged so rapidly that she'd passed Emile and caught up with her parents. — Jonathan Franzen

It's the fate of most Ping-Pong tables in home basements eventually to serve the ends of other, more desperate games. — Jonathan Franzen

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

How, by the logic of addiction, could we not have proceeded to the needle and the vein? — Jonathan Franzen

You may be poor, but the one thing nobody can take away from you is the freedom to fuck up your life whatever way you want to. — Jonathan Franzen

Most of the lights were burning brightly, but near the center of the spool was a patch of unlit bulbs - a substantia nigra deep inside the tangle. — Jonathan Franzen

Hell-o-oh," she called with the silly lilt with which she and Tom announced arrivals. "Hello," Tom called from the living room, without the lilt. — Jonathan Franzen

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

She was having an outburst with no advance warning. — Jonathan Franzen

My practical intelligence said no, but my heart said yes. — Jonathan Franzen

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

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

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

I'm a carnivore, a carnivore, a terrible disgusting carnivore. — Jonathan Franzen

He wasn't constituted to hate himself subjectively, but he did hate the object he was in the world. — Jonathan Franzen

I find it a huge strain to be responsible for my tastes and be known and defined by them. — Jonathan Franzen

It was heartbreaking to see old Ossis trying to ape the thinking of Wessis, trying to master the lingo of capitalist self-promotion. — Jonathan Franzen

There are few things harder to imagine than other people's conversations about yourself. — Jonathan Franzen

[Patty's] Copernican wish to the be sun around which all things revolved — Jonathan Franzen

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

The Mekons were kind of like the background music of my life. — Jonathan Franzen

The following afternoon, alone in their room, and oppressed by not yet having made the promised call to Connie ... — Jonathan Franzen

That was the way most people were - stupid. — Jonathan Franzen

You can think of me thinking of you, because that's what I'll be doing whenever you think of me. — 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

Use well thy freedom. — Jonathan Franzen

For every reader who dies today, a viewer is born, and we seem to be witnessing ... the final tipping balance. — Jonathan Franzen

Her body looked to be only a healthy diet and some regular exercise away from greatness, — Jonathan Franzen

He knows how love blinds people to the truth about the one they are in love with. — Jonathan Franzen

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

What you discovered about yourself in raising children wasn't always agreeable or attractive. — Jonathan Franzen

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

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

I may be dead tomorrow, I said to myself, but — Jonathan Franzen

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

Today's Baudelaires are hip-hop artists. — Jonathan Franzen

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

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

The weekly thirty minutes of sexual stress was a chronic but low-grade discomfort, like the humidity in Florida — Jonathan Franzen

I was about 13, in some ways, when I wrote the first book. Approximately 18 when I wrote the second. — Jonathan Franzen

[H]er mind was like a balloon with static cling, attracting random ideas as they floated by[.] — Jonathan Franzen

It's like having one red sock in a load of white laundry. One red sock, and nothing is ever white again. — Jonathan Franzen

She was so much a personality and so little anything else that even staring straight at her he had no idea what she really looked like. — Jonathan Franzen

The one thing everyone in the Republic had plenty of was time. Whatever you didn't do today really could be put off until tomorrow. — Jonathan Franzen

And Pip wanted to do good, if only for lack of better ambitions. — Jonathan Franzen

You're either reading a book or you're not. — Jonathan Franzen

She had a lifetime of practice at arriving late in a family of four and being loved by all. — Jonathan Franzen

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

But nothing disturbs the feeling of specialness like the presence of other human beings feeling identically special. — Jonathan Franzen

Secrets are the way you know you even have an inside. — Jonathan Franzen

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

It seems to me self-evident that if you have a life, things happen in it, and certain things do change; certain things end. People you know die. — Jonathan Franzen

And Silence of the Lambs is a really smart book. — Jonathan Franzen

Nothing got inside the head without becoming pictures. — Jonathan Franzen

Whatever else happened, she wanted a dog in her life. — Jonathan Franzen

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

It was as if the bones and veins were working their way to the surface; as if the skin were water receding to expose shapes at the bottom of a harbor. — Jonathan Franzen

Once upon a time, it had sufficed to write 'The Sound and the Fury' or 'The Sun Also Rises.' But now bigness was essential. Thickness, length. — Jonathan Franzen

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

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

Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting. — Jonathan Franzen

Cooks were the mitochondria of humanity; they had their own separate DNA, they floated in a cell and powered it but were not really of it. — Jonathan Franzen

The rage inside him was titanic. How to keep from exploding? What a relief exploding was. — Jonathan Franzen

It's healthy to say uncle when your bone's about to break. — Jonathan Franzen

Jonathan Franzen seems like the grumpiest guy, and he doesn't seem to like much of anything, so I really don't care what he has to say. — Kaui Hart Hemmings

She quickly discovered that the world is divided into people who know how to be comfortable by themselves on a bar chair and people who do not. — Jonathan Franzen

In the New Testament, the only things that mattered were love and free will. — Jonathan Franzen

Sometimes I think my life is nothing but one long process of bodily betrayal. — Jonathan Franzen

Infinitesimally soon, the eternity of his own death would commence and render all of this unreal. — Jonathan Franzen

Dogs again had it right. They didn't trouble themselves with mysteries that could never be solved anyway. — Jonathan Franzen

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

The fog is clearing; life is a matter of taste. — Frank Wedekind