391 Quotes by Jonathan Franzen

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.

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.

An odd thing about beauty, however, is that it’s absence tends not to arouse our sympathy as much as other forms of privation do.

If time was infinite, then three seconds and three years represented the same infinitely small fraction of it. And so, if inflicting three years of fear and suffering was wrong, as everyone would agree, then inflicting three seconds of it was no less wrong. He caught a fleeting glimpse of God in the math here, in the infinitesimal duration of a life.

Life a miserable contradiction, endless desire but limited supplies, your birth just a ticket to your death:.

Birds were like dinosaurs’ better selves. They had short lives and long summers. We all should be so lucky as to leave behind such heirs.

I’ve moved away from that sort of deep-ecological extremism. I started to think: what can we do for wild birds right now? I don’t want these particular species to disappear.

When I was younger, the main struggle was to be a ‘good writer.’ Now I more or less take my writing abilities for granted, although this doesn’t mean I always write well.

That everything in the society actually revolves about women, not men. The men are all looking at pictures of women, and the women are all communicating with other women.