Jonathan Franzen Quotes - Page 4

Quotes about:

• I think we live in an era of problems that, if you step back and look at them globally, can't be solved. One response to that is, "Oh well, it's all hopeless. The natural world is getting wrecked, birds are disappearing, the planet is warming and so anything we might do on a smaller scale is meaningless."

  Jonathan Franzen

  Thinking, Bird, Looks

  "Exclusive: Jonathan Franzen sounds off on bird poaching, climate change and “performing love”". Interview with LIindsay Abrams, www.salon.com. April 27, 2015.

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• I think the mission for the writer is to tell stories in a compelling way about the stuff that cannot be talked about, that cannot be gotten at with shallow media.

  Jonathan Franzen

  Thinking, Media, Stories

  Interview with Gregg LaGambina, www.avclub.com. September 1, 2010.

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• Family's the one thing you can't change. You can cover yourself with tattoos. You can get a grapefruit-sized ring going through your earlobe. You can change your name. You can move to a different continent. But you cannot change who your parents were, and who your siblings are, and who your children are.

  Jonathan Franzen

  Tattoo, Children, Sibling

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• What you discovered about yourself in raising children wasn't always agreeable or attractive.

  Jonathan Franzen

  Children, Attractive, About Yourself

  Jonathan Franzen (2001). “The Corrections: A Novel”, p.263, Macmillan

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• 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

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

  Jonathan Franzen

  Fall, People, Enchantment

  Jonathan Franzen (2001). “The Corrections: A Novel”, p.10, Macmillan

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• I don't personally like the e-readers they've come up with so far. I don't fetishize books, but I do like that they're solid and unchanging.

  Jonathan Franzen

  Book, Unchanging, Come Up

  Interview with Gregg LaGambina, www.avclub.com. September 1, 2010.

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• Mr. Franzen said he and Mr. Wallace, over years of letters and conversations about the ethical role of the novelist, had come to the joint conclusion that the purpose of writing fiction was “a way out of loneliness.” (NY Times article on the memorial service of David Foster Wallace.)

  Jonathan Franzen

  Loneliness, Writing, Years

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• 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.

  Jonathan Franzen

  Ideas, Littles, Pity

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• I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.

  Jonathan Franzen

  Insanity, Levels, Certain

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• He couldn't figure out if she was immensely well adjusted or seriously messed up.

  Jonathan Franzen

  Figures, Messed Up, Wells

  Jonathan Franzen (2001). “The Corrections: A Novel”, p.61, Macmillan

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• You encountered a misery near the end of the day and it took a while to gauge its full extent. Some miseries had sharp curvature and could be negotiated readily. Others had almost no curvature and you knew you'd be spending hours turning the corner. Great whopping-big planet-sized miseries.

  Jonathan Franzen

  The End Of The Day, Gauges, Misery

  Jonathan Franzen (2001). “The Corrections: A Novel”, p.255, Macmillan

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• Even in an intensely mediated world, in a world that offers at least the illusion of radical self-invention and radical freedom of choice, I as a novelist am drawn to the things you can't get away from. Because much of the promise of radical self-invention, of defining yourself through this marvelous freedom of choice, it's just a lie. It's a lie that we all buy into, because it helps the economy run.

  Jonathan Franzen

  Running, Lying, Self

  Interview with Gregg LaGambina, www.avclub.com. September 1, 2010.

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• Remind me again what's wrong with Dave Matthews?" "Basically everything, except technical proficiency," Walter said. "Right." "But maybe especially the banality of the lyrics. 'Gotta be free, so free, yeah, yeah, yeah. Can't live without my freedom, yeah yeah.' That's pretty much every song.

  Jonathan Franzen

  Song, Dave, Yeah

  Jonathan Franzen (2010). “Freedom: A Novel”, p.145, Macmillan

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• The reason this system can’t be overthrown in this country,” Walter said, “is all about freedom. The reason the free market in Europe is tempered by socialism is that they’re not so hung up on personal liberties there. They also have lower population growth rates, despite comparable income levels. The Europans are all-around more rational, basically. And the conversation about rights in this country isn’t rational. It’s taking place on the level of emotion, and class resentments, which is why the right is so good at exploiting it.

  Jonathan Franzen

  Country, Rights, Europe

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• THE CORRECTION, when it finally came, was not an overnight bursting of a bubble but a much more gentle letdown, a year-long leakage of value from key financial markets, a contraction too gradual to generate headlines and too predictable to seriously hurt anybody but fools and the working poor.

  Jonathan Franzen

  Hurt, Years, Keys

  Jonathan Franzen (2001). “The Corrections: A Novel”, p.563, Macmillan

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• [T]hat I could find company and consolation and hope in an object pulled almost at random from a bookshelf--felt akin to an instance of religious grace.

  Jonathan Franzen

  Religious, Grace, Hats

  Jonathan Franzen (2007). “How to Be Alone: Essays”, p.57, Macmillan

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• Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.

  Jonathan Franzen

  Writing, Interesting, Verbs

  "Ten rules for writing fiction" by Jonathan Franzen, www.theguardian.com. February 19, 2010.

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• Fiction, I believed, was the transmutation of experiential dross into linguistic gold. Fiction meant taking up whatever the world had abandoned by the road and making something beautiful out of it.

  Jonathan Franzen

  Beautiful, Gold, Fiction

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• Twitter is unspeakably irritating. Twitter stands for everything I oppose.

  Jonathan Franzen

  Irritating

  "Jonathan Franzen: 'Twitter is the ultimate irresponsible medium'" by Alison Flood, www.theguardian.com. March 7, 2012.

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• As with all forms of liberation, of which the liberation of women is only one example, it is easy to suppose in a time of freedom that the darker days of repression can never come again.

  Jonathan Franzen

  Example, Easy, Form

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• Here was a torture that Greek inventors of the Feast and the Stone had omitted from their Hades: the Blanket of Self-Deception. A lovely warm blanket as far as it covered the soul in torment, but it never quite covered everything.

  Jonathan Franzen

  Self, Greek, Soul

  Jonathan Franzen (2001). “The Corrections: A Novel”, p.312, Macmillan

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

  Jonathan Franzen

  Uncles, Healthy, Bones

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• It took hours to turn the clock back 30 seconds.

  Jonathan Franzen

  Regret, Hours, Clock

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• Everything he did was at least partial and often total bullshit” (402).

  Jonathan Franzen

  Bullshit

  Jonathan Franzen (2010). “Freedom: A Novel”, p.402, Macmillan

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