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ccc3006
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Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people.
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marriage
idealism
co-dependence
the-rules-of-attraction
victims-of-narcissists
sociopathology
divorce
idealists
narcissism
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Jonathan Franzen |
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c9af1d7
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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, which is an overwhelming estrangement from humanity. The more persuaded you are of your unique access to the rottenness, the more afraid you become of engaging with the world; and the less you engage with the world, the more perfidiously happ..
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depression
anomie
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Jonathan Franzen |
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072a00e
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But the first lesson reading teaches is how to be alone.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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0bc08ee
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You may be poor, but the one thing nobody can take away from you is the freedom to fuck up your life whatever way you want to.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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130ea98
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And when the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight--isn't that a strange thing? That absolutely nothing changes except that you see things differently and you're less fearful and less anxious and generally stronger as a result: isn't it amazing that a completely invisible thing in your head can feel realer than anything you've experienced before? You see things more clearly and you that you're seeing them more clearly. ..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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d603bd8
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There is, after all, a kind of happiness in unhappiness, if it's the right unhappiness.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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da777ff
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It's all circling around the same problem of personal liberties," Walter said. "People came to this country for either money or freedom. If you don't have money, you cling to your freedoms all the more angrily. Even if smoking kills you, even if you can't afford to feed your kids, even if your kids are getting shot down by maniacs with assault rifles. You may be poor, but the one thing nobody can take away from you is the freedom to fuck up..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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7b19ea7
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This wasn't the person he'd thought he was, or would have chosen to be if he'd been free to choose, but there was something comforting and liberating about being an actual definite someone, rather than a collection of contradictory potential someones.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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0047e8f
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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.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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e756a01
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The human species was given dominion over the earth and took the opportunity to exterminate other species and warm the atmosphere and generally ruin things in its own image, but it paid this price for its privileges: that the finite and specific animal body of this species contained a brain capable of conceiving the infinite and wishing to be infinite itself.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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a9be2d2
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And meanwhile the sad truth was that not everyone could be extraordinary, not everyone could be extremely cool; because whom would this leave to be ordinary?
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Jonathan Franzen |
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2a66041
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The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage.
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personality
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Jonathan Franzen |
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d157be5
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But nothing disturbs the feeling of specialness like the presence of other human beings feeling identically special.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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df5cf5a
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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 wer..
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humanity
love
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Jonathan Franzen |
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40765ab
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Imagine that human existence is defined by an Ache: the Ache of our not being, each of us, the center of the universe; of our desires forever outnumbering our means of satisfying them.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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757e68c
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Integrity's a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They're pure hyena.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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beec660
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Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.
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writing-inspiration
writing-philosophy
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Jonathan Franzen |
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fc4a321
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But she was seventeen now and not actually dumb. She knew that you could love somebody more than anything and still not love the person all that much, if you were busy with other things.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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37f333e
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He couldn't figure out if she was immensely well adjusted or seriously messed up.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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d80b9ae
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Without privacy there was no point in being an individual.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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3f49dbd
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Life, in her experience, had a kind of velvet luster. You looked at yourself from one perspective and all you saw was weirdness. Move your head a little bit, though, and everything looked reasonably normal.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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5931361
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So, what, you got cigarette burns, too?" Gitanes said. Chip showed his palm, "It's nothing." "Self-inflicted. You pathetic American." "Different kind of prison" Chip said."
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Jonathan Franzen |
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f5ab896
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It took hours to turn the clock back 30 seconds.
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relationships
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Jonathan Franzen |
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ff7439b
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The world was ending then, it's ending still, and I'm happy to belong to it again.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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eaa1896
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There's a hazardous sadness to the first sounds of someone else's work in the morning; it's as if stillness experiences pain in being broken.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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d64572b
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I admire your capacity for admiring.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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bc053a4
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Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive- my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.
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self-knowledge
integrity
reading
social-change
isolation
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Jonathan Franzen |
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6d247d5
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At forty-five, I feel grateful almost daily to be the adult I wished I could be when I was seventeen. I work on my arm strength at the gym; I've become pretty good with tools. At the same time, almost daily, I lose battles with the seventeen-year-old who's still inside me. I eat half a box of Oreos for lunch, I binge on TV, I make sweeping moral judgments. I run around in torn jeans, I drink martinis on a Tuesday night, I stare at beer-comm..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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4df4b1d
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What you discovered about yourself in raising children wasn't always agreeable or attractive.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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40b5994
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Stupidity mistook itself for intelligence, whereas intelligence knew its own stupidity.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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dfacef3
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It's healthy to say uncle when your bone's about to break.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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92c92ec
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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.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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97142e4
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Each new thing he encountered in life impelled him in a direction that fully convinced him of its rightness, but then the next new thing loomed up and impelled him in the opposite direction, which also felt right. There was no controlling narrative: he seemed to himself a purely reactive pinball in a game whose only object was to stay alive for staying alive's sake.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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787a2e7
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I think the iPod is the true face of Republican politics, and I'm in favor of the music industry ... standing up proud and saying it out loud: We in the Chiclet-manufacturing business are not about social justice, ...we're not about a coherent set of national ideals, we're not about wisdom. We're about choosing what WE want to listen to and ignoring everything else.... We're about giving ourselves a mindless feel-good treat every five minut..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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b912e7b
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I wanted all of her and resented other boys for wanting any part of her.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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44b559a
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His tiredness hurt so much it kept him awake.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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a848e41
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For every reader who dies today, a viewer is born, and we seem to be witnessing . . . the final tipping balance.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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6deecdd
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Robin turned and looked straight into her. "What's life for?" "I don't know." "I don't either. But I don't think it's about winning."
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Jonathan Franzen |
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d7c0dc8
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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 ..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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20bef28
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I find it a huge strain to be responsible for my tastes and be known and defined by them.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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fb8957a
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He wanted this someone to see how much he hurt.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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085b986
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Her eyes weren't blinking. There was still something almost dead in them, something very far away. She seemed to be seeing all the way through to the back of him and beyond, out into the cold space of the future in which they would both soon be dead, out into the nothingness that Lalitha and his mother and his father had already passed into, and yet she was looking straight into his eyes, and he could feel her getting warmer by the minute. ..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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dbae572
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Use well thy freedom.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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8074809
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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."
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Jonathan Franzen |