391 Quotes by Jonathan Franzen

It's healthy to say uncle when your bone's about to break.

It was a way of recognizing places of enchantment: people falling asleep like this.

Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan.

The mark of a legitimate revolution - the scientific, for example - was that it didn't brag about its revolutionariness but simply occurred.

There was no arguing with blood.

So many Jonathans. A plague of literary Jonathans.

Simply being a "social isolate" as a child does not, however, doom you to bad breath and poor party skills as an adult. In fact, it can make you hypersocial. It's just that at some point you'll begin to feel a gnawing, almost remorseful need to be alone and do some reading - to reconnect to that community.

My father had always been supremely suspicious of psychiatry. He viewed therapy as an invasion of privacy, mental health as a matter of self-discipline , and my mother's increasingly pointed suggestions that he "talk to someone" as acts of aggression - little lobbed grenades of blame for their unhappiness as a couple.

Parents are programmed to want the best for their kids, regardless of what they get in return. That's what love is supposed to be like, right? But in fact, if you think about it, that's kind of a strange belief. Given what we know about the way people really are. Selfish and shortsighted and egotistical and needy. Why should being a parent, in and of itself, somehow confer superior-personhood on everybody who tries it? Obviously it doesn't.