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Robin turned and looked straight into her. What's life for? I don't know. I don't either. But I don't think it's about winning.

Jonathan Franzen

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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
Either
Winning
Think
Thinking
Robins
Life
Robin
Straight
Turned
Looked

More quotes by Jonathan Franzen

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Life, in her experience, had a kind of velvet luster. You looked at yourself from one perspective and all you saw was weirdness. Move your head a little bit, though, and everything looked reasonably normal.
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Patty knew, in her heart, that he was wrong in his impression of her. And the mistake she went to go on to make, the really big life mistake, was to go along with Walter's version of her in spite of knowing that it wasn't right. He seemed so certain of her goodness that eventually he wore her down.
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There's a hazardous sadness to the first sounds of someone else's work in the morning it's as if stillness experiences pain in being broken.
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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.
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It's healthy to say uncle when your bone's about to break.
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An ink bottle, which now seems impossibly quaint, was still thinkable as a symbol in 1970.
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Readers and writers are united in their need for solitude, in their pursuit of substance in a time of ever-increasing evanescence: in their reach inward, via print, for a way out of loneliness.
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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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When I was younger, the main struggle was to be a 'good writer.' Now I more or less take my writing abilities for granted, although this doesn't mean I always write well.
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I've moved away from that sort of deep-ecological extremism. I started to think: what can we do for wild birds right now? I don't want these particular species to disappear.
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The world was ending then, it's ending still, and I'm happy to belong to it again.
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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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We may freak out globally, but we suffer locally.
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I feel that working environmentalists are, in the main, happier than armchair environmentalists.
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His tiredness hurt so much it kept him awake.
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Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.
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Every good writer I know needs to go into some deep, quiet place to do work that is fully imagined. And what the Internet brings is lots of vulgar data. It is the antithesis of the imagination. It leaves nothing to the imagination.
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The figure of my father looms large in my imagination.
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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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Birds were like dinosaurs' better selves. They had short lives and long summers. We all should be so lucky as to leave behind such heirs.
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