Jonathan Franzen Quotes

Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people.

The problem with making a virtual world of oneself is akin to the problem with projecting ourselves onto a cyberworld: there’s no end of virtual spaces in which to seek stimulation, but their very end...

The shame and disorder in his house were like the shame and disorder in his head.

When I'm writing I don't want anyone else in the room - including myself.

Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular. But the realism is merely a mask for depression's actual essence...

You're either reading a book or you're not.

Walter had never liked cats. They'd seemed to him the sociopaths of the pet world, a species domesticated as an evil necessary for the control of rodents and subsequently fetishized the way unhappy co...

To be so vigorous and healthy and yet so

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 stra...

We who were not so pathologically far out on the spectrum of self-involvement, we dwellers of the visible spectrum who could imagine how it felt to go beyond violet but were not ourselves beyond it, c...

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 alm...

I'm saying that children are not supposed to get along with their parents. Your parents are not supposed to be your best friends. There's supposed to be some element of rebellion. That's how you defin...

Invisible Facebook and Google algorithms steer you toward content you agree with, and nonconforming voices stay silent for fear of being flamed or trolled or unfriended. The result is a silo in which,...

From somewhere, in college, Pip had gotten the idea—her mind was like a balloon with static cling, attracting random ideas as they floated by—that the height of civilization was to spend Sunday mornin...

There's the imperative to keep secrets, and the imperative to have them known. How do you know that you're a person, distinct from other people? By keeping certain things to yourself. You guard them i...

His problem consisted of a burning wish not to have done the things he'd done.

He was lovable the way a child is lovable, and he was capable of returning love with a childlike purity. If love is nevertheless excluded from his work, it's because he never quite felt that he deserv...

The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through...ringing throughout the house was an alarm bell that no one but Alfred and Enid could hear directly.

And meanwhile everybody's wondering what this old woman with half her face drooping onto her shoulder is doing bagging their groceries. You have no idea how I envy you your cubicle. The invisibility o...

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