|
d764a90
|
He became another data point in the American experiment of self-government, an experiment statistically skewed from the outset, because it wasn't the people with sociable genes who fled the crowded Old World for the new continent; it was the people who didn't get along well with others.
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
29a37c3
|
You can all supply your own favorite, most nauseating examples of the commodification of love. Mine include the wedding industry, TV ads that feature cute young children or the giving of automobiles as Christmas presents, and the particularly grotesque equation of diamond jewelry with everlasting devotion. The message, in each case, is that if you love somebody you should buy stuff. A related phenomenon is the ongoing transformation, courte..
|
|
love
liking
like
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
fa15a0c
|
The pain was quite extraordinary. And yet also weirdly welcome and restorative, bringing him news of his aliveness and his caughtness in a story larger than himself.
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
9cc01dd
|
Elective ignorance was a great survival skill, perhaps the greatest.
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
99a47c0
|
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 |
|
8ecad06
|
How could I have thought that I needed to cure myself in order to fit into the 'real' world? I didn't need curing, and the world didn't, either; the only thing that did need curing was my understanding of my place in it. Without that understanding - without a sense of belonging to the real world - it was impossible to thrive in an imagined one.
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
6e39f3b
|
Nothing got inside the head without becoming pictures.
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
04aab11
|
It was a way of recognizing places of enchantment: people falling asleep like this.
|
|
sleep
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
1e282cd
|
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 |
|
2cadf31
|
she was so much a personality and so little anything else that even staring straight at her he had no idea what she really looked like.
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
94feea0
|
Thank you," he said. "Welcome. Welcome especially to Mr. Coyle Mathis and the other men and women of Forster Hollow who are going to be employed at this rather strikingly energy-inefficient plant. It's a long way from Forster Hollow, isn't it?" "So, yes, welcome," he said. "Welcome to the middle class! That's what I want to say. Although, quickly, before I go any further, I also want to say to Mr. Mathis here in the front row: I know you do..
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
56a2e3a
|
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?
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
0117c79
|
She wondered: How could people respond to these images if images didn't secretly enjoy the same status as real things? Not that images were so powerful, but that the world was so weak. It could be read, certainly, in its weakness, as on days when the sun baked fallen apples in orchards and the valley smelled like cider, and cold nights when Jordan had driven Chadds Ford for dinner and the tires of her Chevrolet had crunched on the gravel dr..
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
6485363
|
He and his wife loved each other and brought each other daily pain. Everything else he was doing in his life, even his longing for Lalitha, amounted to little more than flight from circumstance. He and Patty couldn't live together and couldn't imagine living apart. Each time he thought they'd reached the unbearable breaking point, it turned out that there was still further they could go without breaking.
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
bf94eed
|
Katz had read extensively in popular sociobiology, and his understanding of the depressive personality type and its seemingly perverse persistence in the human gene pool was that depression was successful adaptation to ceaseless pain and hardship. Pessimism, feelings of worthlessness and lack of entitlement, inability to derive satisfaction from pleasure, a tormenting awareness of the world's general crappiness: for Katz Jewish paternal for..
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
6138369
|
The simple fact of the matter is that trying to be perfectly likable is incompatible with loving relationships. Sooner or later, for example, you're going to find yourself in a hideous, screaming fight, and you'll hear coming out of your mouth things that you yourself don't like at all, things that shatter your self-image as a fair, kind, cool, attractive, in-control, funny, likable person. Something realer than likability has come out in y..
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
15b786c
|
Everyone thinks they have strict limits," she said, "until they cross them."
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
4b414cf
|
The problem with making a virtual world of oneself is akin to the problem with projecting ourselves onto a cyberworld: there's no end of virtual spaces in which to seek stimulation, but their very endlessness, the perpetual stimulation without satisfaction, becomes imprisoning.
|
|
suicide
solitude
loneliness
satisfaction
depression
cyberworld
endlessness
facebook-addiction
filler
first-world-problems
virtual
solitary
stimulation
distractions
dissatisfaction
facebook-quotes
david-foster-wallace
jonathan-franzen
boredom
facebook
cyber
emptiness
problems
robinson-crusoe
empty
void
lonely
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
cd74170
|
Readers and writers are united in their need for solitude, in their pursuit of substance in a time of ever-increasing evanescence: in their reach inward, via print, for a way out of loneliness.
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
de37a87
|
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.
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
0bc2020
|
Oh, misanthropy and sourness. Gary wanted to enjoy being a man of wealth and leisure, but the country was making it none too easy. All around him, millions of newly minted American millionaires were engaged in the identical pursuit of feeling extraordinary - of buying the perfect Victorian, of skiing the virgin slope, of knowing the chef personally, of locating the beach that had no footprints. There were further tens of millions of young A..
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
6417def
|
And this of course, was the simplest definition of depression that he knew of: strongly disliking yourself.
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
20c336d
|
Being dead's only a problem if you know you're dead, which you never do because you're dead!
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
f0dbf0a
|
Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
dbafd7f
|
Serious fans always need to feel uniquely connected to the object of their fandom; they jealously guard those points of connection, however tiny or imaginary, that justify the feeling of uniqueness.
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
fa4d52c
|
What he'd never understood about men in his position, in all the books he'd read and movies he'd seen about them, was clearer to him now: you couldn't keep expecting wholehearted love without, at some point, requiting it. There was no credit to be earned for simply being good.
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
c66e69c
|
He had a happy canine way of seeking approval without seeming insecure.
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
401dbe7
|
The world was overpopulated with talkers and underpopulated by listeners,
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
ebce92e
|
It's like having one red sock in a load of white laundry. One red sock, and nothing is ever white again.
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
e5d9b03
|
Don't talk to me about hatred if you haven't been married.
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
25ff422
|
it seemed as if the Internet was governed more by fear: the fear of unpopularity and uncoolness, the fear of missing out, the fear of being flamed or forgotten.
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
5729e96
|
there are few things harder to imagine than other people's conversations about yourself.
|
|
|
jonathan franzen |
|
b4d0134
|
And yet the feeling of injustice itself turned out to be strangely physical. Even realer, in a way, than a her hurting, smelling, sweating body. Injustice had a shape, an a weight, and a temperature, and a texture, and a very bad taste.
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
4154239
|
I had started keeping a journal, and I was discovering that I didn't need school in order to experience the misery of appearances. I could manufacture excruciating embarrassment in the privacy of my bedroom, simply by reading what I'd written in the journal the day before. Its pages faithfully mirrored my fraudulence and pomposity and immaturity. Reading it made me desperate to change myself, to sound less idiotic. As George Benson had stre..
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
4e05b0e
|
He'd lost track of what he wanted, and since who a person was what a person wanted, you could say that he'd lost track of himself.
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
73f046d
|
The problem was money and the indignities of life without it. Every stroller, cell phone, Yankees cap, and SUV he saw was a torment. He wasn't covetous, he wasn't envious. But without money he was hardly a man.
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
9b857fe
|
What made drugs perpetually so sexy was the opportunity to be other. Years after he'd figured out that pot only made him paranoid and sleepless, he still got hard-ons at the thought of smoking it. Still lusted for that jailbreak.
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
69ebdfe
|
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.
|
|
society
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
767a505
|
Adolescence is best enjoyed without self-consciousness, but self-consciousness, unfortunately, is its leading symptom. Even when something important happens to you, even when your heart's getting crushed or exalted, even when you're absorbed in building the foundations of a personality, there comes these moments when you're aware that what's happening is not the real story. Unless you actually die, the real story is still ahead of you. This..
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
504a3f6
|
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.
|
|
freedom
franzen
self-pity
miserable
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
1ef7983
|
There's hardly anybody who doesn't hate somebody now, and nobody at all whom somebody doesn't hate.
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
ea96b08
|
And maybe this was what craziness was: an emergency valve to relieve the pressure of unbearable anxiety.
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
63fe437
|
The conservatives won. They turned the Democrats into a center-right party. They got the entire country singing 'God Bless America,' stress on God, at every single major-league baseball game. They won on every fucking front, but they especially won culturally, and especially regarding babies. In 1970 it was cool to care about the planet's future and not have kids. Now the one thing everyone agrees on, right and left, is that it's beautiful ..
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
036c3fc
|
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 |