391 Quotes by Jonathan Franzen

Pip wondered what the secret was of being different in a way that attracted people, as opposed to her own way.

All we ever argued about was nothing. As if by multiplying zero content by infinite talk we could make it stop being zero. In order to have sex again we´d had to separate, and in order to have frenzied and complusive sex we´d had to get divorced.

He was certifiably insane, an Ayn Rander who fancied himself an Übermensch and “the Singularity’s chosen avatar,

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

A child who's got the habit will start reading under the covers with a flashlight," she said. "If the parents are smart, they'll forbid the child to do this, and thereby encourage her. Otherwise she'll find a peer who also has the habit, and the two of them will keep it a secret between them.

Only in a crowded, diverse place like New York, surrounded by strangeness, do I come home to myself.

The Berglunds were the super-guilty sort of liberals who needed to forgive everybody so their own good fortune could be forgiven; who lack the courage of their privilege

In terms of having an experience, seriously contemplating a murder was almost as good as going through with it, and it had the added benefit of not entailing risk. Between prison and no prison, no prison was clearly preferable.

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