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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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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
Stones
Torment
Quite
Deception
Soul
Torture
Omitted
Everything
Covered
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Self
Greek
Hades
Never
Stone
Feast
Lovely
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Warm
Blanket
More quotes by Jonathan Franzen
It's healthy to say uncle when your bone's about to break.
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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.
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I guess my life hasn’t always been happy, or easy, or exactly what I want. At a certain point, I just have to try not to think too much about certain things, or else they’ll break my heart.
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There is, after all, a kind of happiness in unhappiness, if it's the right unhappiness.
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This wasn't the person he'd thought he was, or would have chosen to be if he'd been free to choose, but there was something comforting and liberating about being an actual definite someone, rather than a collection of contradictory potential someones.
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Fiction that isn't an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn't worth writing for anything but money.
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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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An ink bottle, which now seems impossibly quaint, was still thinkable as a symbol in 1970.
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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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It's just a matter of writing the kind of book I enjoy reading. Something better be happening at the beginning, and then on every page after, or I get irritated.
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Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.
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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.
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His tiredness hurt so much it kept him awake.
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It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
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You encountered a misery near the end of the day and it took a while to gauge its full extent. Some miseries had sharp curvature and could be negotiated readily. Others had almost no curvature and you knew you'd be spending hours turning the corner. Great whopping-big planet-sized miseries.
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I feel that working environmentalists are, in the main, happier than armchair environmentalists.
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Being dead's only a problem if you know you're dead, which you never do because you're dead!
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But as far as being popular, yeah, I think Dave Barry is really funny.
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Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people.
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The novelist has more and more to say to readers who have less and less time to read: where to find the energy to engage a culture in crisis when the crisis consists in the impossibility of engaging with the culture?
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