1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
2208
3346
3522
4730
4731
4732
4733
4734
5443
5619
6757
7581
8098
8422
8625
8752
8832
8882
8913
8932
8945
8953
8957
8960
8962
8963
8964
8965
▲
▼
| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 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 | ||
| 0364570 | Walking is broken falls, the body leaning, the legs advancing to catch it. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 7f94a75 | Por que os conservadores, que controlavam todos os tres poderes do governo federal, ainda estavam tao irados - com o ceticismo respeitoso de alguns acerca da guerra do Iraque, com os casais gays que queriam casar, com o afavel Al Gore e a cautelosa Hillary Clinton, com as especies ameacadas e seus defensores, com os impostos e o preco da gasolina que estavam entre os menores de todas as nacoes industrializadas, com a grande imprensa cujos c.. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 208dc59 | Il primo minuto della giornata lavorativa ci ricorda tutti gli altri minuti di cui e fatto il giorno, e non e mai bene pensare ai minuti come entita singole. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| c79983c | The fantastic thing about Andreas is he knows the Internet is the greatest truth device ever. And what does it tell us? That everything in the society actually revolves about women, not men. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| c608375 | the chances of one civilization sticking around to get a message from another were vanishingly low, because it was too damned easy to split the atom. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 9560f42 | The New Regime even recycled the old Republic's buzzwords, collective, collaborative. Axiomatic to both was that a new species of humanity was emerging. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 426ee6a | If you were looking aside and mentally adding up the hours until the execution of a young killer, all that registered was something dark flashing by. But if you happened to be gazing directly at the window in question and you happened as well to be feeling unprecedentedly calm, four-tenths of a second was more than enough time to identify the falling object as your husband of forty-seven years. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 8d6e884 | The American middle-class appetite for illegal drugs provided the capital to build some of the most sophisticated and effective companies on earth. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| ca8bda1 | depression was a successful adaptation to ceaseless pain and hardship [...] feeling bad all the time and expecting the worst had been natural ways of equilibrating themselves with the lousiness of their circumstances. Few things gratified depressives, after all, more than really bad news [...] Grim situations were Katz's niche the way murky water was a carp's [...] he might well have started making music again, had it not been for the accid.. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 789eb98 | Patty's] Copernican wish to the be sun around which all things revolved | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 3950aff | D'ou venait l'apitoiement sur soi ? Cette quantite extraordinaire d'apitoiement sur soi ? Selon presque tous les criteres possibles, elle menait une vie tres heureuse. Elle avait toutes ses journees pour penser a une facon decente et satisfaisante de vivre, et pourtant tout ce qu'elle semblait recolter avec tous ses choix et toute sa liberte, c'etait de plus en plus de malheur. Du coup, l'autobiographie en arrive presque a la conclusion qu'.. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| eb235db | His feeling of having crashed did not consist of envy, exactly, or even entirely of having outlived himself. It was more like despair about the world's splinteredness. The nation was fighting ugly ground wars in two countries, the planet was heating up like a toaster oven, and here at the 9:30, all around him, were hundreds of kids in the mold of the banana-bread-baking Sarah, with their sweet, yearnings, their innocent entitlement - to wha.. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| ec86b94 | Your little body had once been deeper inside your mother than your father's dick had ever gone, you'd squeezed your entire goddamned head through her pussy, and then for the longest time you'd sucked on her tits whenever you felt like it, and you couldn't for the life of you remember it. You found yourself self-alienated from the get-go. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| e2f89e4 | La gente e venuta in questo paese per cercare soldi o liberta. Se non hai i soldi, ti aggrappi ancora piu rabbiosamente alle tue liberta. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| e4fb8ee | She'd been drinking jug wine steadily for four hours. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 6a3bcde | The world was overpopulated with talkers and underpopulated by listeners, and many of her sources gave her the impression that she was the first person who'd ever truly listened to them. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| a224983 | The only decoration on the gray segments of her cubicle was a bumper sticker, AT LEAST THE WAR ON THE ENVIRONMENT IS GOING WELL. Her colleagues' cubicles were covered with photos | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| dc4b13d | 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. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 50b7e68 | A child who's got the habit will start reading under the covers with a flashlight," she said. "If the parents are smart, they'll forbid the child to do this, and thereby encourage her. Otherwise she'll find a peer who also has the habit, and the two of them will keep it a secret between them." | reader reader-life | Jonathan Franzen |