391 Quotes by Jonathan Franzen

- We just went through a bad divorce.- Violent bad? Restraining-order bad?- No, no. Just emotionally painful. - OK, so an ordinary divorce.

Încep să cred că paradisul nu e o mulțumire veșnică. Ci ma degrabă o stare de mulțumire care face totul să pară veșnic. Nu există viață veșnică pentru că n-o să câștigi niciodată cursa cu timpul, totuși, dacă ești mulțumit, poți scăpa de timp, pentru că ajunge să nu mai conteze.

And yet the feeling of injustice itself turned out to be strangely physical. Even realer, in a way, than a her hurting, smelling, sweating body. Injustice had a shape, an a weight, and a temperature, and a texture, and a very bad taste.

And meanwhile everybody's wondering what this old woman with half her face drooping onto her shoulder is doing bagging their groceries. You have no idea how I envy you your cubicle. The invisibility of it.""Let's not romanticize the cubicle," Pip said."This is the terrible thing about bodies. They're so visible, so visible.

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.

I'm a carnivore, a carnivore, a terrible disgusting carnivore.

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

It’s great that a song now costs exactly the same as a pack of gum and lasts exactly the same amount of time before it loses its flavour and you have to spend another buck.

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.