391 Quotes by Jonathan Franzen

Expecting a novel to bear the weight of our whole disturbed society – to help solve our contemporary problems – seems to me a peculiarly American delusion. To write sentences of such authenticity that refuge can be taken in them: isn’t this enough? Isn’t it a lot?

It seems not to occur to you that I might have had other very smart patients. The difference between them and me is that I’m a psychologist and they are not. I don’t have to be as smart as you to help you. I only have to be smart about one thing.

My practical intelligence said no, but my heart said yes.

What you discovered about yourself in raising children wasn’t always agreeable or attractive.

His life was much fuller than hers, and the breathing space this gave her was welcome. If she wanted his complete attention again, all she had to do was put his hands on her body; he was not undoglike himself in this regard.

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?

You could slap his wrist for saying it, but then he said it with his face, and you could spank him for making faces, but then he said it with his eyes, and there were limits to correction-no way, in the end, to penetrate behind the blue irises and eradicate a boy’s disgust.

Walking is broken falls, the body leaning, the legs advancing to catch it.

The world was ending then, it’s ending still, and I’m happy to belong to it again.