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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| bbd6549 | I had a nightmare about the Averys' sweet-tempered German shepherd, Ina. In the dream, as I was sitting on the floor in the Averys' living room, the dog walked up to me and began to insult me. She said I was a frivolous, cynical, attention-seeking "fag" whose entire life had been phony. I answered her frivolously and cynically and chucked her under the chin. She grinned at me with malice, as if to make clear that she understood me to the co.. | german-shepherd | Jonathan Franzen | |
| 69b5a5e | After Gary had given the enlargements their sour baths, he raised the lights and discovered that both prints were webbed over with peculiar yellow blotches. He cursed a little, not so much because he cared about the prints as because he wanted to preserve his good spirits, his serotonin-rich mood, and to do this he needed... cooperation from the world of objects. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 581ce88 | because, no matter how he'd come to hate her, he was also, even now, trying to impress her and win her praise, bringing her his Bertrand Russell papers as mother-flattering evidence of his outsize intellect, constructing his rhyme schemes. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| fbdf58a | Was there anything more sweetly existential than the walking done for sex in the most desolate of streets at three in the morning? The casual slaughter of a reasonable sleep schedule? The strangeness of passing someone's hair-curlered mother in a bathrobe on your way to her heartrendingly hideous bathroom? | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 0c2fc76 | Que hermosa es siempre la cara que no hemos visto. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| ecff830 | The mark of a legitimate revolution--the scientific, for example--was that it didn't brag about its revolutionariness but simply occurred. Only the weak and fearful, the illegitimate, had to brag. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 33129f5 | I was very young, and so I know," my mother said. "I know what can happen." "We're not you," Anabel said. "That's what everyone thinks," my mother said. "They think they're not like other people. But then life teaches you some lessons." | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| aec1878 | You need closeness with other people. And how is closeness built? By sharing secrets. Colleen | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| c6fe843 | She didn't need to see more people, she took money from hundreds of people at the bakery, men who stared at her indecently, old women who tweezed coins from cloth pouches as if picking a nose with thumb and finger. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| bba0874 | Have you ever been tempted to leave a thought unspoken?" "I'm a writer, baby. Voicing thought is what I'm poorly paid and uncharitably reviewed for." | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 2ce11ba | A silence fell. Frogs in the night were calling, calling, calling. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 76ba13c | In a decadent society people can slowly drift or slowly be drawn by the culture of commerce into yearning for violence. Maybe people have a deep congenital awareness that no civilization lasts forever, that the most peaceful prosperity will someday have to end, or maybe it's just human nature | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 4aa49db | They're all about being the special one, the chosen one. 'Only you can save the world from Evil.' That kind of thing. And never mind that specialness stops meaning anything when every kid is special. I remember watching those movies and thinking about all the unspecial characters in the chorus or whatever. The people just doing the hard work of belonging to society. They're the ones my heart really goes out to. The movie should be about the.. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| e5608ca | Joey wished there were some different world he could belong to, some simpler world in which a good life could be had at nobody else's expense. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| e585db6 | In the old days, Christmas lights had come in short strings that were wired serially. If a single bulb burned out or even just loosened in its socket, the circuit was broken and the entire string went dark. One of the season's rituals for Gary and Chip had been to tighten each little brass-footed bulb in a darkened string and then, if this didn't work, to replace each bulb in turn until the dead culprit was found. (What joy the boys had tak.. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 3fde6e6 | 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 | ||
| 3f277c6 | Secrets are the way you know you even have an inside. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| ebf966c | His life was much fuller than hers, and the breathing space this gave her was welcome. If she wanted his complete attention again, all she had to do was put his hands on her body; he was not undoglike himself in this regard. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 243b98f | I considered, quite seriously, strangling her to death while I fucked her and then throwing myself in front of the 8:11 bus. The idea was not without its logic and appeal. But there were the bus driver's feelings to consider ... | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 7b40575 | Now Connie seemed to be suggesting that what made people complain about stupidity was their own stupidity. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| f805531 | Kierkegaard, in 'Either/Or,' makes fun of the 'busy man' for whom busyness is a way of avoiding an honest self-reckoning. You might wake up in the middle of the night and realize that you're lonely in your marriage, or that you need to think about what your level of consumption is doing to the planet, but the next day you have a million little things to do, and the day after that you have another million things. As long as there's no end of.. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 0ae81cd | My practical intelligence said no, but my heart said yes. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 81e36b7 | The thing about games is that you don't want to look too closely at why you're playing them. A great yawning emptiness underlies them, a close relative of the nothingness that lies beneath the surface of our busy lives. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| ca3487e | Para mi, el azul mediterraneo ya no es bonito. La transparencia de sus aguas, tan valorada por los veraneantes, es la misma que la de una piscina esteril. En sus playas hay pocos olores y pocas aves, y sus profundidades van camino de vaciarse; gran parte del pescado que ahora se consume en Europa procede ilegalmente, sin que nadie indague mucho, del oceano del oeste de Africa. Miro el azul y no veo un mar, sino una postal, fina como un pape.. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 68eadd3 | The rage inside him was titanic. How to keep from exploding? What a relief exploding was. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| b18af8c | The apparatchiks, too, were an eternal type. The tone of the new ones, in their TED Talks, in PowerPointed product launches, in testimony to parliaments and congresses, in utopianly titled books, was a smarmy syrup of convenient conviction and personal surrender that he remembered well from the Republic. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| cfb55b4 | 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 meaningless. Sooner or later, the inside of you needs a witness. Otherwise you're j.. | relationship secret trust | Jonathan Franzen | |
| e4026bf | Kluger notes that these cases arguably amount to "personal injury claims in disguise," and that the Supreme Court has ruled that federal cigarette-labeling laws are an effective shield against such claims. Logically, in other words, the states ought to be suing smokers, not cigarette makers. And perhaps smokers, in turn, ought to be suing Social Security and private pension funds for all the money they'll save by dying early." | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 76edeae | Gary si augurava che ogni ulteriore migrazione verso le coste venisse proibita, e tutti gli abitanti del Midwest fossero incoraggiati a tornare ai cibi pesanti, agli abiti fuori moda e ai giochi di societa, in modo da mantenere una riserva nazionale strategica di idiozia | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 94ac703 | He was certifiably insane, an Ayn Rander who fancied himself an Ubermensch and "the Singularity's chosen avatar," | john-mcafee silicon-valley venture-capitalist | Jonathan Franzen | |
| f8de747 | No one stays haunted by a person they're not still in love with. | love | Jonathan Franzen | |
| 5d98112 | Y se fue. Y ella se convirtio en mejor lectora. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 784ac86 | It was this other side of Avery - the fact that he so visibly had an other side - that was helping me finally understand all three of the dimensions in Kafka: that a man could be a sweet, sympathetic, comically needy victim and a lascivious, self-aggrandizing, grudge-bearing bore, and also, crucially, a third thing: a flickering consciousness, a simultaneity of culpable urge and poignant self-reproach, a person in process. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| b5baa29 | There's something very wrong when a taste bud is still reporting strangeness five hours after you had a sweetened drink. Do you know that if you smoke crystal meth even once, your entire brain chemistry is altered for the rest of your life? That's what stevia tastes like to me." "I'm not sitting here puffing on a meth stem, if that's what you're trying to say." | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 90dfd1c | The novel is whatever novelists are doing at a given time. If we're not doing the big social novel fifteen years from now, it'll probably mean our sensibilities have changed in ways that make such work less compelling to us -- we won't stop because the market dried up. The writer leads, he doesn't follow. The dynamic lives in the writer's mind, not in the size of the audience. And if the social novel lives, but only barely, surviving in the.. | letters-of-note novel novel-writing | Don DeLillo | |
| e0dd6a3 | Attempting to write an honest essay doesn't alter the multiplicity of my selves. What changes, if I take the time to stop and measure, is that my multi-selved identity acquires substance. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 0c23ec3 | Life a miserable contradiction, endless desire but limited supplies, your birth just a ticket to your death: | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| c816c86 | 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. 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. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 6faf70e | Even harder to admit is how depressed I was. As the social stigma of depression disappears, the aesthetic stigma increases. It's not just that depression has become fashionable to the point of banality. It's the sense that we live in a reductively binary culture: you're either healthy or you're sick, you either function or you don't. And if that flattening of the field of possibilities is precisely what's depressing you, you're inclined to .. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 3994777 | 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. Does that make any sense? | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| ee60153 | On the other hand, some of the family's impatience with the public is justified. When I use Federal Express, I accept as a condition of business that its standardized forms must be filled out in printed letters. An e-mail address off by a single character goes nowhere. Transposing two digits in a phone number gets me somebody speaking heatedly in Portuguese. Electronic media tell you instantly when you've made an error; with the post office.. | post-office | Jonathan Franzen | |
| 578a27f | No existe nadie cuya personalidad real nos guste hasta la ultima particula. Por eso, un mundo donde todo consiste en gustar es en ultima instancia una mentira. Pero si existe la persona de cuya personalidad real uno ama hasta la ultima particula. Y por eso el amor representa tal amenaza existencial para el orden del tecnoconsumismo: Saca a la luz la mentira | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 1457091 | Your challenge, then, is to create a religion of your own by being secular in a religious way, or religious in a secular way. You can learn how to see the secular from a religious angle, and vice versa. | Thomas Moore | ||
| 2b448fd | If you are often angry, trace the roots in story and then apply your anger as a force and a sharp edge to whatever you do. Don't indulge in venting. Always convert and transform your anger into something worthwhile. Let people see and feel your anger, but don't explode every time you feel it. | Thomas Moore |