391 Quotes by Jonathan Franzen

It was as if the bones and veins were working their way to the surface; as if the skin were water receding to expose shapes at the bottom of a harbor.

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.

To herself, she was no longer the person who'd left him waiting forever in her bedroom and then rained abuse on him, but he had no way of knowing this, because, of course, she was also still that person.

She had all day every day to figure out some decent and satisfying way to live, and yet all she ever seemed to get for all her choices and all her freedom was more miserable. The autobiographer is almost forced to the conclusion that she pitied herself for being so free.

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

I hate the concept of likeability—it gave us two terms of George Bush, whom a plurality of voters wanted to have a beer with, and Facebook. You’d unfriend a lot of people if you knew them as intimately and unsparingly as a good novel would. But not the ones you actually love.

The infinite variety of human badness.

How could I have thought that I needed to cure myself in order to fit into the 'real' world? I didn't need curing, and the world didn't, either; the only thing that did need curing was my understanding of my place in it. Without that understanding - without a sense of belonging to the real world - it was impossible to thrive in an imagined one.

And if the world refused to square with his version of reality then it was necessarily an uncaring world, a sour and sickening world, a penal colony, and he was doomed to be violently lonely in it. He bowed his head at the thought of how much strength a man would need to survive an entire life so lonely.