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681406f
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His problem consisted of a burning wish not to have done the things he'd done.
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the-corrections
jonathan-franzen
shame
regret
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Jonathan Franzen |
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d8a6651
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The only way to avoid despair was not to involve himself at all.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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1a20f16
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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 define yourself as a person.
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family-relationships
the-corrections
jonathan-franzen
growing-up
parents
parents-and-children
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Jonathan Franzen |
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2967864
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If you substituted networks for socialism, you got the Internet. Its competing platforms were united in their ambition to define every term of your existence.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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59c61c1
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But like so many phenomena that were beautiful at a distance--thunderheads, volcanic eruptions, the stars and planets--this alluring pain proved, at closer range, to be inhuman in its scale.
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shifts
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Jonathan Franzen |
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4e603cf
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There came a time, however, when death ceased to be the enforcer of finitude and began to look, instead, like the last opportunity for radical transformation, the only plausible portal to the infinite.
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life
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Jonathan Franzen |
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1372ecd
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Impossibility is attractive.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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762bdb2
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That his comments actually pertained to her questions--that in spite of the infinity in his eyes he was participating in a finite conversation--made up for the sourness in his face.
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love
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Jonathan Franzen |
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6c1c892
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The house felt more like a body--softer, more mortal and organic--than like a building
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Jonathan Franzen |
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320f882
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The shame and disorder in his house were like the shame and disorder in his head.
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the-corrections
jonathan-franzen
disorder
shame
mental-health
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Jonathan Franzen |
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96fec76
|
To be so vigorous and healthy and yet so
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lethargy-and-indolence
the-corrections
lethargy
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Jonathan Franzen |
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2d7cff7
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The horror of underage smoking veils a horror of teen and preteen sexuality, and one of the biggest pleasant empty dreams being pushed these days by Madison Avenue is that a child is innocent until his or her eighteenth birthday. The truth is that without firm parental guidance teenagers make all sorts of irrevocable decisions before they're old enough to appreciate the consequences--they drop out of school, they get pregnant, they major in..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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4b89ae8
|
My apartment rightfully belongs to the people of Lithuania!
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Jonathan Franzen |
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643fc4e
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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.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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aeffe49
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Silence, however, is a useful statement only if someone, somewhere, expects your voice to be loud.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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195f3ad
|
Lenin had been a risk-taker. Trotsky had been one, too, until Stalin had made him the Bill Gates of the Soviet Union, the excoriated crypto-reactionary.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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8aba6cf
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lys mn lmmkn fy Zrwf mly@ mnt`sh@ khdhh 'n yfshl l 'Hmq 'w nSb.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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607416e
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Her life would have been easier if she hadn't loved him so much, but she couldn't help loving him. Just to look at him was to love him.
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love-quotes
marriage
love
relationships-quotes
the-corrections
vicissitudes-of-life
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Jonathan Franzen |
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b85a388
|
It's all circling around the same problem of personal liberties," Walter said. "People came to this country for either money or 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 your life whatever way you want to. That's what Bil..
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politics
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Jonathan Franzen |
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2c85787
|
Does the world really need more amateur photographs of giraffes?
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Jonathan Franzen |
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f1e4ab8
|
Some of the most influential novels of recent years, by Rachel Cusk and Karl Ove Knausgaard, take the method of self-conscious first-person testimony to a new level. Their more extreme admirers will tell you that imagination and invention are outmoded contrivances; that to inhabit the subjectivity of a character unlike the author is an act of appropriation, even colonialism; that the only authentic and politically defensible mode of narrati..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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4e9eaf4
|
Denise left the kitchen and took the plate to Alfred, for whom the problem of existence was this: that, in the manner of a wheat seedling thrusting itself up out of the earth, the world moved forward in a time by adding cell after cell to its leading edge, piling moment on moment, and that to grasp the world even in its freshest youngest moment provided no guarantee that you'd be able to grasp it again a moment later. By the time he'd estab..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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2103cd0
|
Because I don't trust people," Pip said. "Even my mom, who I do trust, has things she doesn't tell me, really important things, and it would be nice to have a way to find them out without her having to tell me. I'd know the stuff I need to know, but she'd still be OK. And then, with everyone else, literally everyone, I can never be sure of what they're thinking about me, and I don't seem to be very good at guessing what it is. So, it'd be n..
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trust
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Jonathan Franzen |
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0cd4baa
|
The note of self-righteousness in his voice set fire to a larger and more diffuse pool of the gas, a combustible political substance that had seeped into her from her mother and then from certain college professors and certain gross-out movies and now also from Annagret, a sense of the unfairness of what one professor had called the anisotropy of gendered relationships, wherein boys could camouflage their objectifying desires with the langu..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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0c4e0dd
|
En general, la perspectiva del dolor, el dolor de la perdida, de la ruptura, de la muerte, es la razon por la que resulta tan tentador eludir el amor y quedarse a salvo en el mundo del gustar
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Jonathan Franzen |
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23a5ab7
|
That summer when I was feeling very much like Juliet holding the potion, the therapist would tell me, "Just know that those thoughts aren't you. That's the OCD, it's not you." It was a kind gesture--she was offering me the illness narrative that reigns now, the one that constructs very, very firm boundaries between brain and self, illness and consciousness, self and other. I clung to that for a while, the notion that the maelstrom happening..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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f6cc5de
|
El dolor se presenta como producto e indicador naturales de estar vivo en un mundo que opone resistencia. Pasar por la vida indoloramente es no haber vivido.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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b0f5b99
|
Cuando te quedas en tu habitacion y te encolerizas o adoptas una actitud de desden o te encoges de hombros, como hice muchos anos, el mundo y sus problemas te intimidan de manera extraordinaria. Pero cuando sales y estableces una relacion real con personas reales, o incluso con animales reales, existe el peligro muy real de acabar queriendo a alguno de ellos.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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0a84701
|
Don't talk to me about hatred if you haven't been married. Only love, only long empathy and identification and compassion, can root another person in your heart so deeply that there's no escaping your hatred of her, not ever; especially not when the thing you hate most about her is her capacity to be hurt by you. The love persists and the hatred with it. Even hating your own heart is no relief. I don't think I'd ever hated her more than I d..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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bc4a0da
|
Don't you love me, Mother?" Cornered by the question, she agreed to try to help him. Before she left the church, it seemed necessary to both of them that they embrace, and what an odd embrace it was, what a sick transaction. She, who wasn't capable of real love, pretended to love him while he, who really did love her, exploited her pretended love."
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Jonathan Franzen |
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5ce18d2
|
the first lesson reading teaches us is how to be alone.
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solitude
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Jonathan Franzen |
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ddd4aa9
|
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 you know you even have an inside. A radical exhibitionist is a person who has forfeited his identity. But identity in a vacuum is also mean..
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identity
secrets
intimacy
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Jonathan Franzen |
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23ed10f
|
And yet: guilt must be the most monstrous of human quantities, because what I did to relieve my guilt then--stay in the marriage--was precisely the thing I felt guiltiest about later, when the marriage was over.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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2e0afb6
|
An ink bottle, which now seems impossibly quaint, was still thinkable as a symbol in 1970.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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46caa84
|
Today's Baudelaires are hip-hop artists.
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Jonathan Franzen |