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3b79dae
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He was remembering the nights he'd sat upstairs with one or both of his boys or with his girl in the crook of his arm, their damp bath-smelling heads hard against his ribs as he read aloud to them from "Black Beauty" or "The Chronicles of Narnia". How his voice alone, its palpable resonance, had made them drowsy. These were evenings, and there were hundreds of them, maybe thousands, when nothing traumatic enough to leave a scar had befallen..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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3ed6ae3
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Then she waited, with parted lips and a saucy challenge in her eyes, to see how her presence -- the drama of being her -- was registering. In the way of such chicks, she seemed convinced of the originality of her provocation.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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68ad1ec
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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
trust
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Jonathan Franzen |
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c527101
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My conception of a novel is that it ought to be a personal struggle, a direct and total engagement with the author's story of his or her own life. This conception, again, I take from Kafka, who, although he was never transformed into an insect, and although he never had a piece of food (an apple from his family's table!) lodged in his flesh and rotting there, devoted his whole life as a writer to describing his personal struggle with his fa..
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kafka
novel
writing
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Jonathan Franzen |
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e1c6e90
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She quickly discovered that the world is divided into people who know how to be comfortable by themselves on a bar chair and people who do not.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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26eea06
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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.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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ca56253
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And if you sat at the dinner table long enough, whether in punishment or in refusal or simply in boredom, you never stopped sitting there. Some part of you sat there all your life.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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ab1d851
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he could feel the outside world closing in on him, demanding his consideration, but as long as he stayed by himself in the woods he was able to remain true to his refusal. He came from a long line of refusers, he had the constitution for it. There seemed to be almost nothing left of Lalitha; she was breaking up on him the way dead songbirds did in the wild--they were impossibly light to begin with, and as soon as their little hearts stopped..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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284ecf0
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The aim of the Internet and its associated technologies was to "liberate" humanity from the tasks--making things, learning things, remembering things--that had previously given meaning to life and thus had constituted life. Now it seemed as if the only task that meant anything was search-engine optimization."
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Jonathan Franzen |
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a762a40
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Patty believed that parents have a duty to teach their children how to recognize reality when they see it.
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page-81
parenting
parents
reality
religion
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Jonathan Franzen |
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3f472fa
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Fog spilled from the heights of San Francisco like the liquid it almost was. On better days it spread across the bay and took over Oakland street by street, a thing you saw coming, a change you watched happening to you, a season on the move. Where it encountered redwoods, the most local of rains fell. Where it found open space, its weightless pale passage seemed both endless and like the end of all things. It was a temporary sadness, the mo..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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baca7cf
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And if the world refused to square with his version of reality then it was necessarily an uncaring world, a sour and sickening world, a penal colony, and he was doomed to be violently lonely in it. He bowed his head at the thought of how much strength a man would need to survive an entire life so lonely.
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lonely
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Jonathan Franzen |
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6bbdf01
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Our joint plan was to be poor and obscure and pure and take the world by surprise at a later date.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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1982f71
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Only in a crowded, diverse place like New York, surrounded by strangeness, do I come home to myself.
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cities
new-york-city
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Jonathan Franzen |
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c55edc1
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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."
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Jonathan Franzen |
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c69089d
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I had a Viking sense of entitlement to whatever provisions I could plunder.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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26dd439
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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.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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bab9ad6
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In the earliest years, when you could still drive a Volvo 240 without feeling self-conscious, the collective task in Ramsey Hill was to relearn certain life skills that your own parents had fled to the suburbs specifically to unlearn, like how to interest the local cops in actually doing their job, and how to protect a bike from a highly motivated thief, and when to bother rousting a drunk from your lawn furniture, and how to encourage fera..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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14ce6fa
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She had to tell him, while she still had time, how wrong he'd been and how right she'd been. How wrong not to love her more, how wrong not to cherish her and have sex at every opportunity, how wrong not to trust her financial instincts, how wrong to have spent so much time at work and so little with the children, how wrong to have been so negative, how wrong to have been gloomy, how wrong to have run away from life, how wrong to have said n..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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a4f1f64
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Whatever else happened, she wanted a dog in her life.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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65382b0
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Earlier in the day, while killing some hours by circling in blue ballpoint ink every uppercase M in the front section of a month-old New York Times, Chip had concluded that he was behaving like a depressed person. Now, as his telephone began to ring, it occurred to him that a depressed person ought to continue staring at the TV and ignore the ringing -- ought to light another cigarette and, with no trace of emotional affect, watch another c..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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6983a7f
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Birds were like dinosaurs' better selves. They had short lives and long summers. We all should be so lucky as to leave behind such heirs.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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7383d47
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It's good to have friends in life. If you want to have friends, you have to remember that nobody's perfect.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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e1e61f4
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Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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ab69628
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It offended his sense of proportion and economy to throw away a ninety-percent serviceable string of lights. It offended his sense of himself, because he was an individual from an age of individuals, and a string of lights was, like him, an individual thing. No matter how little the thing had cost, to throw it away was to deny its value and, by extension, the value of individuals generally: to willfully designate as trash an object that you..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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dab85d9
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What happened in the virtual world, where beauty existed for the purpose of being hated and besmirched, was more compelling than what happened in the real world, where beauty seemed to have no purpose at all.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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ad2a8f4
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Power, power, power: how could the world be organized around the struggle for a thing so lonely and oppressive in the having of it?
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Jonathan Franzen |
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ae76f92
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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.
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franzen
love
neediness
parenthood
selfishness
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Jonathan Franzen |
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ab69d97
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Deploring other people--their lack of perfection--had always been our sport.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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1b6101a
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Everything he did was at least partial and often total bullshit" (402)."
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Jonathan Franzen |
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5c39197
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compliments were like a beverage she was unconsciously smart enough to deny herself even one drop of, because her thirst for them was infinite.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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7d7c980
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Wow, thank you so much for the compliment!" Patty answered brightly, to end things. At the time, she believed that it was because she was so selflessly team-spirited that direct personal compliments made her so uncomfortable. The autobiographer now thinks that compliments were like a beverage she was unconsciously smart enough to deny herself even one drop of, because her thirst for them was infinite."
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Jonathan Franzen |
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00355ff
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It was true that Al had asked her to move the jars and magazines, and there was probably a word for the way she'd stepped around those jars and magazines for the last eleven days, often nearly stumbling on them; maybe a psychiatric word with many syllables or maybe a simple word like "spite." But it seemed to her that he'd asked her to do more than "one thing" while he was gone. He'd also asked her to make the boys three meals a day, and cl..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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fd72071
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That was the way most people were - stupid.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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19347f2
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She pondered the arrangements of the paintings on a wall like a writer pondered commas.
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mother
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Jonathan Franzen |
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70e0ede
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He felt like a helium balloon straining skyward on a slender string.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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6dd9495
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She has embarrassingly inquired, of her children, whether there's a woman in his life, and has rejoiced at hearing no. Not because she doesn't want him to be happy, not because she has any right or even much inclination to be jealous anymore, but because it means there's some shadow of a chance that he still thinks, as she does more than ever, that they were not just the worst thing that ever happened to each other, they were also the best ..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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a05f849
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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.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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1897b14
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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. The first minute of the workday reminds you of all the other minutes that a day consists of, and it's never a good thing to think of minutes as individuals. Only after other minutes have joined the naked, lonely first minute does the day become more safely integrated into dayness.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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93c5e0a
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I'm starting to think paradise isn't eternal contentment. It's more like there's something eternal about feeling contented. There's no such thing as eternal life, because you're never going to outrun time, but you can still escape time if you're contented, because then time doesn't matter.
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happiness
meditation
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Jonathan Franzen |
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8987143
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Why the conservatives, who controlled all three branches of the federal government, were still so enraged--at respectful skeptics of the Iraq War, at gay couples who wanted to get married, at bland Al Gore and cautious Hillary Clinton, at endangered species and their advocates, at taxes and gas prices that were among the lowest of any industrialized nation, at a mainstream media whose corporate owners were themselves conservatives, at the M..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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cad64dd
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Even then, when the hike was perfect, I would wonder, 'Now what?' And take a picture. Take another picture. Like a man with a photogenic girlfriend he didn't love.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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c50b1b5
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Alfred believed that the real and the true were a minority that the world was bent on exterminating.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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3044081
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People nowadays seemed to resent the railroads for abandoning romantic steam power in favor of diesel. People didn't understand the first goddamned thing about running a railroad. A diesel locomotive was versatile, efficient, and low-maintenance. People thought the railroad owed them romantic favors, and then they belly ached if a train was slow. That was the way most people were--stupid.
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Jonathan Franzen |