Franzen Quotes

“You're either reading a book or you're not.”
― Jonathan Franzen

“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.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Freedom

“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.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Freedom

“Con questo non voglio dire che il depresso e insicuro Charlie Brown, l’egoista e sadica Lucy, l’eccentrico filosofo Linus e l’ossessivo Schroeder (che soddisfa le sue ambizioni beethoveniane con un pianoforte giocattolo e una sola ottava) non siano tutti avatar di Schultz. Ma il suo vero alter ego è chiaramente Snoopy: l’imbroglione proteiforme che fonda la propria libertà sulla certezza di essere in fondo adorabile, il trasformista che, per puro divertimento, può diventare un elicottero, un giocatore di hokey o il Grande Brachetto, e poi di nuovo, in un lampo, prima che il suo virtuosismo possa annoiarvi o sminuirvi, tornare a essere il cagnolino vivace che aspetta solo la cena.”
― Jonathan Franzen

“-Ma Kafka parla della tua vita! - disse Avery. - Senza nulla togliere alla tua ammirazione per Rilke, devo dirti che Kafka c'entra con la tua vita molto più di Rilke. Kafka era come noi. Tutti questi scrittori erano esseri umani che cercavano di trovare un senso alla propria vita. E Kafka più di tutti! Kafka aveva paura della morte, aveva problemi con il sesso, aveva problemi con le donne, aveva problemi con il lavoro, aveva problemi con i genitori. E scriveva narrativa per cercare di capirci qualcosa.”
― Jonathan Franzen

“My theory is that identity consists of two contradictory imperatives. 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 inside you, because, if you don't, there's no distinction between inside and outside. Secrets are the way to know you even have an inside. A radical exhibitionist is a person who has forfeited his identity. But identity in a vacuum is also meaningless. Sooner or later, the inside of you needs a witness. Otherwise you're just a cow, a cat, a stone, a thing in the world, trapped in your thingness.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Purity

“Plus. she'd already been downstairs for so long that it would be unpleasant to go up and beg Jason for further patience, and her life was already so fraught with unpleasantnesses that she'd adopted the strategy of delaying encounters with them as long as possible, even when the delay made it likely that they would be even more unpleasant when she did encounter them.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Purity

“He cried for a long time. I stroked his head and held him close. If he'd been a woman, I would have kissed his hair. But strict limits to intimacy are straight man's burden.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Purity

“When I'm writing I don't want anyone else in the room - including myself.”
― Jonathan Franzen

“Nella sua esperienza poche cose si somigliavano più di due rivoluzioni. Ma d'altronde lui aveva sperimentato solo il tio di rivoluzione che si definisce tale ad alta voce. Il segno di un'autentica rivoluzione - quella scientifica, per esempio - era che non si vantava della propria rivoluzionarietà, ma accadeva e basta. Solo i deboli e i pavidi, i fasulli, avevano bisogno di vantarsi. Il ritornello della sua infanzia, sotto un regime così debole e pavido da erigere un muro per imprigionare quelli che sosteneva di aver liberato, era che la Repubblica aveva il privilegio di essere all'avanguardia della storia. Se il tuo capo era un pezzo di merda e tuo marito ti tradiva, non era colpa del regime, perché il regime serviva la Rivoluzione e la Rivoluzione era al contempo storicamente inevitabile e terribilmente fragile, circondata da nemici. Questa ridicola contraddizione era tipica delle rivoluzioni vanagloriose. Nessun crimine o effetto collaterale imprevisto era così grave da non poter essere giustificato da un sistema che doveva esistere ma poteva facilmente crollare.”
― Jonathan Franzen

“Tom hired more female journalists than male ones. Tom was a strange hybrid feminist, behaviorally beyond reproach but conceptually hostile. "I get feminism as an equal-rights issue," he'd said to her once. "What I don't get is the theory. Whether women are supposed to be exactly the same as men, or different and better than men." And he'd laughed the way he did at things he found silly, and Leila had remained angrily silent, because she was a hybrid the other way around: conceptually a feminist but one of those women whose primary relationships had always been with men and who had benefited professionally, all her life, from her intimacy with the. She'd felt attacked by Tom's laughter, and the two of them had been careful never to discuss feminism again.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Purity

“Her life with Tom was strange and ill-defined and permanently temporary but therefore all the more a life of true life, because it was freely chosen every day, every hour. It reminded her of a distinction she'd learned as a child in Sunday school. Their marriages had been Old Testament, hers a matter of honouring her covenant with Charles, Tom's a matter of fearing Anabel's wrath and judgement. In the New Testament, the only things that mattered were love and free will.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Purity

“He put his hand on her upper thigh and left it there. Pretty much every thought she'd had in the last week had led back to one thing. She was experiencing stronger symptoms of being in love, a queasiness more persistent, a heart more racing, than she remembered having had with Stephen. But the symptoms were ambiguous. A condemned person walking to the gallows had many of the same ones. When Andreas's hand crept, thrillingly, to the inside of her thigh, she had neither the courage nor even the inclination to place a corresponding hand on his leg. The rightness of the phrase 'preyed upon' was becoming evident. The feelings of prey in the grip of a wolf's teeth were hard to distinguish from being in love.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Purity

“She was a little bit in love with Tom, too, because she could afford to be, because she wasn't physically attracted to him - he was both older and 'safe'.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Purity

“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.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Purity

“Whatever chemistry she and Jason had had was still there, if only in the form of regret about never really having acted on it.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Purity

“She was certainly hungry to sleep with someone; it was practically forever since she'd done it. But she liked Jason a little too much to think it was a good idea to sleep with him. What if she started liking him even more? Relationship pain and relationship horror seemed probable.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Purity

“Pip frowned. Every so often, she felt the need to strain against the circumstantial straitjacket in which she'd found herself two years earlier, to see if there might be a little new give in its sleeves. And, every time, she found it exactly as tight as before. Still $130,000 in debt, still her mother's sole comfort. It was kind of remarkable how instantly and totally she'd been trapped the minute her four years of college freedom ended; it would have depressed her, had she been able to afford being depressed.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Purity

“- We just went through a bad divorce.
- Violent bad? Restraining-order bad?
- No, no. Just emotionally painful.
- OK, so an ordinary divorce.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Purity

“I understand that there is a writer named Jonathan Franzen, but I have not read him.”
― Rebecca Solnit, The Mother of All Questions