Jonathan Franzen Quotes About Heart

Quotes about: Heart

• I guess my life hasn’t always been happy, or easy, or exactly what I want. At a certain point, I just have to try not to think too much about certain things, or else they’ll break my heart.

  Jonathan Franzen

  Heart, Thinking, Trying

• Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are. And this is why love, as I understand it, is always specific. Trying to love all of humanity may be a worthy endeavor, but, in a funny way, it keeps the focus on the self, on the self’s own moral or spiritual well-being. Whereas, to love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.

  Jonathan Franzen

  Spiritual, Real, Struggle

  Jonathan Franzen (2012). “Farther Away: Essays”, p.9, Macmillan

• 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 countries fetishize their militaries, saluting the uniforms of killers as cat owners stroke their animals' lovely fur and forgive their claws and fangs. He'd never seen anything in a cat's face but simpering incuriosity and self-interest; you only had to tease one with a mouse-toy to see where it's true heart lay...cats were all about using people

  Jonathan Franzen

  Country, Using People, Heart

  Jonathan Franzen (2010). “Freedom: A Novel”, p.548, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

• Patty knew, in her heart, that he was wrong in his impression of her. And the mistake she went to go on to make, the really big life mistake, was to go along with Walter's version of her in spite of knowing that it wasn't right. He seemed so certain of her goodness that eventually he wore her down.

  Jonathan Franzen

  Mistake, Heart, Knowing

• Everything he'd done with regard to her in the last three years had been calculated to foreclose the intensely personal sort of talks they'd had when he was younger: to get her to shut up, to train her to contain herself, to make her stop pestering him with her overfull heart and her uncensored self. And now that the training was complete and she was obediently trivial with him, he felt bereft of her and wanted to undo it.

  Jonathan Franzen

  Heart, Self, Years

  Jonathan Franzen (2010). “Freedom: A Novel”, p.242, Macmillan

• Just as the camera draws a stake through the heart of serious portraiture, television has killed the novel of social reportage.

  Jonathan Franzen

  Heart, Serious, Cameras

  2002 How to Be Alone.

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