391 Quotes by Jonathan Franzen

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.

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.

Part of why kids like this scared me was that they seemed authentic.

When a smoker says he wants to quit but can’t, what he’s really saying is, “I want to quit but I want even more not to suffer the agony of withdrawal.” To argue otherwise is to jettison any lingering notion of personal responsibility.

Fiction that isn’t an author’s personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn’t worth writing for anything but money.

We girls are supposed to at least have these amazing sexual powers, but in my recent experience this is just a lie told by men to make them feel better about having ALL the power.

The odd truth about Alfred was that love, for him, was a matter not of approaching but of keeping away.

There’s something very wrong when a taste bud is still reporting strangeness five hours after you had a sweetened drink. Do you know that if you smoke crystal meth even once, your entire brain chemistry is altered for the rest of your life? That’s what stevia tastes like to me.” “I’m not sitting here puffing on a meth stem, if that’s what you’re trying to say.

The fantastic thing about Andreas is he knows the Internet is the greatest truth device ever. And what does it tell us? That everything in the society actually revolves about women, not men.