391 Quotes 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.

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.

Two empty hours were a sinus in which infections bred.

Secrets are the way you know you even have an inside.

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.

Only silence was acceptable in its potential to be endless.

When I finally gave up any hope of doing anything representative of the American family, I actually seemed to have tapped into other people’s weirdness in that way.

Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance.

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.