|
246b01a
|
It seems not to occur to you that I might have had other very smart patients. The difference between them and me is that I'm a psychologist and they are not. I don't have to be as smart as you to help you. I only have to be smart about one thing.
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
7dbafa1
|
Only silence was acceptable in its potential to be endless.
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
e68a8b9
|
I suspect that art has always had a particularly tenuous purchase on the American imagination because ours is a country to which so few terrible things have ever happened.
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
d0a0192
|
He may not have been exactly what she wanted in a man, but he was unsurpassable in providing the rabid fandom which, at the time, she needed even more than romance.
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
3d67044
|
As soon as she hit the Send button, she had a spasm of remorse; her interval between action and remorse was diminishing so rapidly that soon she might be all remorse, unable to act at all; which might not be such a bad thing.
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
6445b2c
|
It was clear to everyone that day, and in the months that followed, that Patty's greatest warming influence was on Walter himself. Now, instead of speeding by his neighbors in his angry Prius, he stopped to lower his window and say hello. On weekends, he brought Patty over to the patch of clear ice that the neighborhood kids maintained for hockey and instructed her in skating, which, in a remarkably short time, she became rather good at.
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
4120c60
|
Her heart was full and her senses were sharp, but her head felt liable to burst in the vacuum of her solitude.
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
e03c054
|
Wasn't asking for a recipe supposed to be good coin of the feminine realm?
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
b412642
|
The father was dry-eyed but the mother kept erupting, like loudly, unprovoked, in a keening foreign wail that was almost like song; it sounded strangely ceremonial and impersonal, like a lament for an idea. Walter went alone to the morgue, without any idea. His love was resting beneath a sheet on a gurney of an awkward height, too high to be knelt by. Her hair was as ever, silky and black and thick, as ever, but there was something wrong wi..
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
50f1620
|
He knows how love blinds people to the truth about the one they are in love with.
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
8de1501
|
A candle is like a small sun, but the sun is like a large candle; examined closely, language turns out to operate through the lateral associations of metaphor, rather than through the vertical identifications of naming.
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
bb0b927
|
There was, of course, nowhere better in the world to be than New York City. This fact was the foundation of her family's satisfaction with itself, the platform from which all else could be ridiculed, the collateral of adult sophistication that bought them the right to behave like children.
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
85918cb
|
Det var det der holdt mig vagen om natten," sagde Walter. "Den her opsplitning af landet. For det er det samme problem overalt. Det er ligesadan med internettet eller kabel-tv - der er aldrig noget centrum, der er ingen faelles enighed, der er bare en billion forskellige distraherende stojkilder. Vi kan aldrig saette os og fore en vedvarende samtale, det er bare billigt skrammel og en lorteudvikling, det hele. Alt det aegte, alt det autenti..
|
|
freedom
frihed
oversættelse
translation
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
ab60ccd
|
Du skal bare huske at det ikke er en perfekt krig i en perfekt verden.
|
|
freedom
frihed
translation
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
2831d64
|
You see a person with kids," she said, "and you see how happy they are to be a parent, and you're attracted to their happiness. Impossibility is attractive. You know, the safety of dead-ended things." --
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
af6b6d0
|
Washington's all abstraction. It's about access to power and nothing else. I mean, I'm sure it's fun if you're living next door to Seinfeld, or To Wolfe, or Mike Bloomberg, but living next door to them isn't what New York is about, In Washington people literally talk about how many feet away from John Kerry's house their own house is. The neighborhoods are all so blah, the only thing that turns people on is proximity to power. It's a total ..
|
|
freedom
humor
washington
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
5288ddb
|
If time was infinite, then three seconds and three years represented the same infinitely small fraction of it. And so, if inflicting three years of fear and suffering was wrong, as everyone would agree, then inflicting three seconds of it was no less wrong. He caught a fleeting glimpse of God in the math here, in the infinitesimal duration of a life.
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
76de1ff
|
Her house was the heavy (but not indefinitely heavy) and sturdy (but not everlasting) God that she'd loved and served and been sustained by.
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
ee33bd1
|
Part of why kids like this scared me was that they seemed authentic.
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
f7ac22a
|
Il Paradiso e l'inferno ce li creiamo da soli.
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
e4928d4
|
Walter non aveva mai capito come vivere, ma adesso lo capiva meno che mai
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
c05d87c
|
I guess I was just trying to say that the Internet is good at satisfying needs from a distance. Male or female.
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
d554383
|
That everything in the society actually revolves about women, not men. The men are all looking at pictures of women, and the women are all communicating with other women.
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
1b1c27a
|
I think there's a real hunger for people speaking truth to power. Like, there's a little minority now that's saying you sounded like an asshole and a whiner. But that's just the player-hating fringe. I wouldn't worry about it.
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
1fec959
|
All we ever argued about was nothing. As if by multiplying zero content by infinite talk we could make it stop being zero. In order to have sex again we'd had to separate, and in order to have frenzied and complusive sex we'd had to get divorced.
|
|
divorce
sex
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
12f0821
|
although in truth her passivity was calculated, because she knew passivity inflamed him. He had her, and to some extent she wanted to be had, like an animal: in a mute mutual privacy of violence.
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
2abb3b3
|
There was something almost tasty and almost sexy in letting the annoying boy be punished by her husband. In standing blamelessly aside while the boy suffered for having hurt her. What you discovered about yourself in raising children wasn't always agreeable or attractive.
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
c85ad9b
|
Every night after dinner he honed this skill of enduring a dull thing that brought a parent pleasure. It seemed to him a lifesaving skill. He believed that terrible harm would come to him when he could no longer preserve his mother's illusions.
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
a50f718
|
Love turned out to be soul-crippling, stomach-turning, weirdly claustrophobic: a sense of endlessness bottled up inside him, endless weight, endless potential, with only the small outlet of a shivering pale girl in a bad rain jacket to escape through. Touching her was the farthest thing from his mind. The impulse was to throw himself at her feet.
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
ee82595
|
I saw it all of a sudden. That whether I liked it or not, the survivor and the artist was me, not her. We're all conditioned to think of our children as more important than us, you know, and to live vicariously through them. All of a sudden I was sick of that kind of thinking. I may be dead tomorrow, I said to myself, but I'm alive now. And I can live deliberately. I've paid the price, I've done the work, and I have nothing to be ashamed of..
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
a190406
|
It was this motley band of modest peeps and plovers on the beach who reminded me of the human beings I loved best - the ones who didn't fit in. These birds may or may not have been capable of emotion, but the way they looked, beleaguered there, few in number, my outcast friends, was how I felt. I'd been told that it was bad to anthropomorphize, but I could no longer remember why. It was, in any case, anthropomorphic only to see yourself in ..
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
7f9bf3e
|
She, for her part, was accustomed to my leavings and didn't complain too much. But she still felt about me what she'd always felt, which was what I wouldn't really feel about her until after she was gone. "I hate it when Daylight Savings Time starts while you're here," she told me while we were driving to the airport, "because it means I have an hour less with you."
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
97ce41e
|
We girls are supposed to at least have these amazing sexual powers, but in my recent experience this is just a lie told by men to make them feel better about having ALL the power.
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
00b448b
|
La natura, persino su scala ridottissima, si faceva beffe dell'informatica. Anche migliorato dalla tecnologia, il cervello umano era minuscolo, infinitesimo, in confronto all'universo. Eppure avere un cervello e camminare in un mattino di sole in Bolivia avrebbe dovuto dargli una bella sensazione. Il bosco era impenetrabilmente complesso, ma non lo sapeva. La materia era informazione, l'informazione materia, e solo nel cervello la materia s..
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
1378dcf
|
Because after all," Bob said, "any wealth gained by a person beyond what he can produce by his own labor must have come at the expense of nature or at the expense of another person. Look around. Look at our house, our car, our bank accounts, our clothes, our eating habits, our appliances. Could the physical labor of one family and its immediate ancestors and their one billionth of the country's renewable resources have produced all this? It..
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
3ba50e3
|
No dori i nai-banalnite domakinski zad'lzheniia kato rabota v gradinata, chistene ili pazaruvane i se struvakha po-priiatni i po-speshni ot v'rgalianeto v krevata i sled kato v glavata ti se zagnezdi mis'lta, che triabva nab'rzo da se otpusnesh i oshche po-b'rzo da dostignesh do ekstaz, taka che da mozhesh da izlezesh da presadish tsiganchetata, koito uviakhvat v malkite si plastmasovi saksiiki, niama vr'shchane nazad.
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
e02744e
|
Ne misleshe, che e stanala alkokholichka. Ne beshe alkokholichka. Prosto zaprilichvashe na bashcha si, koito poniakoga t'rseshe spasenie ot blizkite si v chashkata. Navremeto Uolt'r niamashe nishcho protiv, che tia izpiva s naslada chashka-dve vino, sled kato slozhi detsata da spiat. Tv'rdeshe, che e izrasnal, zamaian ot aromata na alkokhol, i se e nauchil da i proshchava, a i kharesval da useshcha vinoto v d'kha i, t'i kato d'kh't i idval ..
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
07c1c97
|
Khora, priizhdakha ot vsichki strani. Peruanski muzikanti svirekha na kharmoniki i barabani na "Iuni'n Skue'r". Pozharnikari kimakha strogo na s'branite krai pametnata plocha za 11 septemvri pred uchast'ka. Dve zheni s kozheni palta dr'zko im otnekha taksito, koeto Keisi beshe sprial pred "Blumingsdeil". Gotini uchenichki s dzhinsi pod minizhupite si sediakha v metroto s shiroko raztvoreni kraka. Mladezhi s's spleteni kosi v'rviakha zaplash..
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
c4f6cf4
|
Da zapochnem s definiraneto na problema - pode Uolt'r. - Problem't e, che nikoi ne se osmeliava da povdigne v'prosa za prenaselenostta. Zashcho? Zashchoto temata ne nosi dividenti. Zashchoto v neia niama nishcho novo. Zashchoto, podobno na globalnoto zatopliane, vse oshche ne sme stignali do etapa, v koito posledstviiata sa neosporimi. I zashchoto, ako zapochnem da pouchavame bednite i neobrazovanite da razhdat po-malko detsa, shche zvuchim..
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
6a4dc96
|
A tova s kreditnite karti - prod'lzhi Pati. - Izpolzvat kreditni karti dori i samo za paketche d'vki. Parite v broi sa tolkova demode! Ako plashchash v broi, triabva pone da mozhesh da s'birash i izvazhdash. Da ob'rnesh vnimanie na choveka, koito ti vr'shcha resto. Pone za edin krat'k mig triabva da ne si na sto protsenta otnesen i vgl'ben v sobstveniia si mal'k sviat. No s kreditna karta ne e taka. Prosto ia podavash razseiano i razseiano ..
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
a7f73fe
|
V s'shchinata si zhenskite tela biakha nap'lno ednakvi, no tova ne izkliuchvashe mnogoobrazieto im - po s'shchiia nachin ne bivashe da se otchaiva i ot ednakvostta na gradivnite elementi na populiarnata muzika, akordite mazhor i minor, 2/4 i 4/4, la-si-la-si-do.
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
8712eef
|
Prev'rnal se v srednostatisticheska edinitsa v amerikanskiia eksperiment po samoupravlenie, koito bil izkriven ot samoto nachalo, t'i kato izbiagalite ot prenaseleniia Star sviat k'm noviia kontinent ne pritezhavali predrazpolagashchi k'm obshchuvane geni, a po-skoro bili ot khorata, koito ne se pogazhdat dobre s okolnite.
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
5d153cf
|
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 beating they were barely more than bits of fluff and hollow bone, easily scatterd in the wind-but this only made him more determined to hold onto what little of her he still had.
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |
|
eb564b0
|
Terwijl hij wachtte tot het trillen minder werd - terwijl hij machteloos keek naar de rukkerige, maaiende bewegingen, alsof hij in een kinderkamer vol krijsende, zich misdragende peuters zat en zijn stem kwijt was en ze niet tot bedaren kon brengen - vermaakte Alfred zich ermee zich voor te stellen dat hij zijn hand afhakte met een bijl: dat hij het ongehoorzame lichaamsdeel duidelijk maakte hoe vreselijk boos hij erop was, hoe weinig hij e..
|
|
|
Jonathan Franzen |