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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 589074d | He'd realized only recently that at the center of the act of sitting down was a loss of control, a blind backwards free fall. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 0313f5f | The tropics were an olfactory revelation. She realized that, coming from a temperate place like the other Santa Cruz, her own Santa Cruz, she'd been like a person developing her vision in poor light. There was such a relative paucity of smells in California that the interconnectedness of all possible smells was not apparent. She remembered a college professor explaining why all the colors the human eye could see could be represented by a tw.. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 08a0954 | It's true I'm male and have some power, but I never asked to be born male. Maybe being male is like being born a predator, and maybe the only right thing for the predator to do, if it sympathizes with smaller animals and won't accept that it was born to kill them, is to betray its nature and starve to death. But maybe it's like something else--like being born with more money than others. Then the right thing to do becomes a more interesting.. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 75dafe8 | Taken together, the animals reminded Pip that she was an animal herself; the multitude of shames she'd left behind in Oakland seemed of smaller consequence at Los Volcanes. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| c1f7ac4 | Like the old politburos, the new politburo styled itself as the enemy of the elite and the friend of the masses, dedicated to giving consumers what they wanted, but to Andrea (who, admittedly, had never learned how to want stuff) 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. In the Republic, people had been terrified of the sta.. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 681406f | His problem consisted of a burning wish not to have done the things he'd done. | jonathan-franzen regret shame the-corrections | Jonathan Franzen | |
| d8a6651 | The only way to avoid despair was not to involve himself at all. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 1a20f16 | I'm saying that children are not supposed to get along with their parents. Your parents are not supposed to be your best friends. There's supposed to be some element of rebellion. That's how you define yourself as a person. | family-relationships growing-up jonathan-franzen parents parents-and-children the-corrections | Jonathan Franzen | |
| 2967864 | If you substituted networks for socialism, you got the Internet. Its competing platforms were united in their ambition to define every term of your existence. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 59c61c1 | But like so many phenomena that were beautiful at a distance--thunderheads, volcanic eruptions, the stars and planets--this alluring pain proved, at closer range, to be inhuman in its scale. | shifts | Jonathan Franzen | |
| 4e603cf | There came a time, however, when death ceased to be the enforcer of finitude and began to look, instead, like the last opportunity for radical transformation, the only plausible portal to the infinite. | life | Jonathan Franzen | |
| 1372ecd | Impossibility is attractive. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 762bdb2 | That his comments actually pertained to her questions--that in spite of the infinity in his eyes he was participating in a finite conversation--made up for the sourness in his face. | love | Jonathan Franzen | |
| 6c1c892 | The house felt more like a body--softer, more mortal and organic--than like a building | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 320f882 | The shame and disorder in his house were like the shame and disorder in his head. | disorder jonathan-franzen mental-health shame the-corrections | Jonathan Franzen | |
| 96fec76 | To be so vigorous and healthy and yet so | lethargy lethargy-and-indolence the-corrections | Jonathan Franzen | |
| 2d7cff7 | The horror of underage smoking veils a horror of teen and preteen sexuality, and one of the biggest pleasant empty dreams being pushed these days by Madison Avenue is that a child is innocent until his or her eighteenth birthday. The truth is that without firm parental guidance teenagers make all sorts of irrevocable decisions before they're old enough to appreciate the consequences--they drop out of school, they get pregnant, they major in.. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 4b89ae8 | My apartment rightfully belongs to the people of Lithuania! | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 643fc4e | 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. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| aeffe49 | Silence, however, is a useful statement only if someone, somewhere, expects your voice to be loud. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 76d310d | Snobs by Julian Fellowes The Piano Teacher by Janice Y. K. Lee People Like Us by Dominick Dunne The Power of Style by Annette Tapert and Diana Edkins (this is out of print; I will lend you my copy) Pride and Avarice by Nicholas Coleridge The Soong Dynasty by Sterling Seagrave Freedom by Jonathan Franzen D. V. by Diana Vreeland A Princess Remembers: The Memoirs of the Maharani of Jaipur by Gayatri Devi Jane Austen--complete works beginning w.. | Kevin Kwan | ||
| 195f3ad | Lenin had been a risk-taker. Trotsky had been one, too, until Stalin had made him the Bill Gates of the Soviet Union, the excoriated crypto-reactionary. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 8aba6cf | lys mn lmmkn fy Zrwf mly@ mnt`sh@ khdhh 'n yfshl l 'Hmq 'w nSb. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 607416e | Her life would have been easier if she hadn't loved him so much, but she couldn't help loving him. Just to look at him was to love him. | love love-quotes marriage relationships-quotes the-corrections vicissitudes-of-life | Jonathan Franzen | |
| b85a388 | It's all circling around the same problem of personal liberties," Walter said. "People came to this country for either money or 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. That's what Bil.. | politics | Jonathan Franzen | |
| 2c85787 | Does the world really need more amateur photographs of giraffes? | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| f1e4ab8 | Some of the most influential novels of recent years, by Rachel Cusk and Karl Ove Knausgaard, take the method of self-conscious first-person testimony to a new level. Their more extreme admirers will tell you that imagination and invention are outmoded contrivances; that to inhabit the subjectivity of a character unlike the author is an act of appropriation, even colonialism; that the only authentic and politically defensible mode of narrati.. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 4e9eaf4 | Denise left the kitchen and took the plate to Alfred, for whom the problem of existence was this: that, in the manner of a wheat seedling thrusting itself up out of the earth, the world moved forward in a time by adding cell after cell to its leading edge, piling moment on moment, and that to grasp the world even in its freshest youngest moment provided no guarantee that you'd be able to grasp it again a moment later. By the time he'd estab.. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 2103cd0 | Because I don't trust people," Pip said. "Even my mom, who I do trust, has things she doesn't tell me, really important things, and it would be nice to have a way to find them out without her having to tell me. I'd know the stuff I need to know, but she'd still be OK. And then, with everyone else, literally everyone, I can never be sure of what they're thinking about me, and I don't seem to be very good at guessing what it is. So, it'd be n.. | trust | Jonathan Franzen | |
| 0cd4baa | The note of self-righteousness in his voice set fire to a larger and more diffuse pool of the gas, a combustible political substance that had seeped into her from her mother and then from certain college professors and certain gross-out movies and now also from Annagret, a sense of the unfairness of what one professor had called the anisotropy of gendered relationships, wherein boys could camouflage their objectifying desires with the langu.. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 4361292 | This emergent world appears to us as a wholly unfamiliar rupture from patterns of the past that could frame a reassuring narrative going forward. Philosophers describe the new territory of the future as "plastic" or "liquid," shapelessly shifting as each disruptive innovation or abandoned certitude washes away whatever fleeting sense of meaning was only just embraced. A kind of foreboding of the times that have not yet arrived, a wariness a.. | Nathan Gardels | ||
| 0c4e0dd | En general, la perspectiva del dolor, el dolor de la perdida, de la ruptura, de la muerte, es la razon por la que resulta tan tentador eludir el amor y quedarse a salvo en el mundo del gustar | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 23a5ab7 | That summer when I was feeling very much like Juliet holding the potion, the therapist would tell me, "Just know that those thoughts aren't you. That's the OCD, it's not you." It was a kind gesture--she was offering me the illness narrative that reigns now, the one that constructs very, very firm boundaries between brain and self, illness and consciousness, self and other. I clung to that for a while, the notion that the maelstrom happening.. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| f6cc5de | El dolor se presenta como producto e indicador naturales de estar vivo en un mundo que opone resistencia. Pasar por la vida indoloramente es no haber vivido. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| b0f5b99 | Cuando te quedas en tu habitacion y te encolerizas o adoptas una actitud de desden o te encoges de hombros, como hice muchos anos, el mundo y sus problemas te intimidan de manera extraordinaria. Pero cuando sales y estableces una relacion real con personas reales, o incluso con animales reales, existe el peligro muy real de acabar queriendo a alguno de ellos. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 0a84701 | 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. Even hating your own heart is no relief. I don't think I'd ever hated her more than I d.. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| bc4a0da | Don't you love me, Mother?" Cornered by the question, she agreed to try to help him. Before she left the church, it seemed necessary to both of them that they embrace, and what an odd embrace it was, what a sick transaction. She, who wasn't capable of real love, pretended to love him while he, who really did love her, exploited her pretended love." | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| 5ce18d2 | the first lesson reading teaches us is how to be alone. | solitude | Jonathan Franzen | |
| ddd4aa9 | 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.. | identity intimacy secrets | Jonathan Franzen | |
| 23ed10f | And yet: guilt must be the most monstrous of human quantities, because what I did to relieve my guilt then--stay in the marriage--was precisely the thing I felt guiltiest about later, when the marriage was over. | Jonathan Franzen | ||
| f96bb87 | I stole your seed, the succubus said to his mind, and he could not deny it. They had done it to him several times in the years of his torment, had taken his seed and spawned alu-demons, Wulfgar's children. It was the first time Wulfgar had been able to consciously recall the memory since his return to the surface, the first time the horror of seeing his demonic offspring had forced itself through the mental barriers he had erected. | R.A. Salvatore | ||
| 53883d0 | How else to explain the accomplishments of a warrior such as Artemis Entreri, who could outfight many drow veterans ten times his age? | R.A. Salvatore | ||
| 377b22c | Anyway, the reason I hate communion isn't the meat-eating component. I get hungry enough, I'll eat anything. The reason I hate it is because everybody in the church except me, Jason Bock, stands up and gets in line for their little snack. I sit there alone in the pew while everybody stares at me as they file past. I sit there and burn under hellfire and damnation stare my father gives me. And I feel awful. But what choice do I have? Accordi.. | communion godless humor | Pete Hautman | |
| c74586d | figuring out was is real isn't always possible, because our own brains are telling us stories | reality stories | Pete Hautman |