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Imagine that human existence is defined by an Ache: the Ache of our not being, each of us, the center of the universe of our desires forever outnumbering our means of satisfying them.

Jonathan Franzen

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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
Existence
Forever
Universe
Ache
Desire
Satisfying
Means
Desires
Human
Center
Humans
Defined
Mean
Imagine

More quotes by Jonathan Franzen

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Expecting a novel to bear the weight of our whole disturbed society—to help solve our contemporary problems—seems to me a peculiarly American delusion. To write sentences of such authenticity that refuge can be taken in them: isn't this enough? Isn't it a lot?
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The place of stillness that you have to go to to write, but also to read seriously, is the point where you can actually make responsible decisions, where you can actually engage productively with an otherwise scary and unmanageable world.
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Since our technology is really just an extension of ourselves, we don’t have to have contempt for its manipulability in the way we might with actual people. It’s all one big endless loop. We like the mirror and the mirror likes us. To friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors.
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The most purely autobiographical ­fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more auto­biographical story than The Meta­morphosis.
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To me, the point of a novel is to take you to a still place. You can multitask with a lot of things, but you can’t really multitask reading a book.
Jonathan Franzen
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The writer’s life is a life of revisions.
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You see more sitting still than chasing after.
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The pain was quite extraordinary. And yet also weirdly welcome and restorative, bringing him news of his aliveness and his caughtness in a story larger than himself.
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[T]o love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.
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Being dead's only a problem if you know you're dead, which you never do because you're dead!
Jonathan Franzen
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It seems to me self-evident that if you have a life, things happen in it, and certain things do change certain things end. People you know die.
Jonathan Franzen
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Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan.
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Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.
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I'm not too concerned what happens to my books after I'm dead. But I am very concerned by what's going on with the culture of reading and writing nowadays.
Jonathan Franzen
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Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.
Jonathan Franzen
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Here was a torture that Greek inventors of the Feast and the Stone had omitted from their Hades: the Blanket of Self-Deception. A lovely warm blanket as far as it covered the soul in torment, but it never quite covered everything.
Jonathan Franzen
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It's very liberating for me to realize that I don't have to step up to the plate with a plot that involves the U.N. Security Council.
Jonathan Franzen
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And meanwhile the sad truth was that not everyone could be extraordinary, not everyone could be extremely cool because whom would this leave to be ordinary?
Jonathan Franzen
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Once there are good sentences on the page, I can feel a loyalty to them and start following their logic, and take refuge from myself.
Jonathan Franzen
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I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.
Jonathan Franzen