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But nothing disturbs the feeling of specialness like the presence of other human beings feeling identically special.

Jonathan Franzen

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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
Special
Feeling
Feelings
Human
Humans
Identically
Nothing
Disturbs
Like
Presence
Beings

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Today's Baudelaires are hip-hop artists.
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There is, after all, a kind of happiness in unhappiness, if it's the right unhappiness.
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But as far as being popular, yeah, I think Dave Barry is really funny.
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The problem with making a virtual world of oneself is akin to the problem with projecting ourselves onto a cyberworld: there’s no end of virtual spaces in which to seek stimulation, but their very endlessness, the perpetual stimulation without satisfaction, becomes imprisoning.
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Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.
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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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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.
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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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I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.
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Just as the camera draws a stake through the heart of serious portraiture, television has killed the novel of social reportage.
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Fiction, I believed, was the transmutation of experiential dross into linguistic gold. Fiction meant taking up whatever the world had abandoned by the road and making something beautiful out of it.
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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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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?
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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 world was ending then, it's ending still, and I'm happy to belong to it again.
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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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It was a way of recognizing places of enchantment: people falling asleep like this.
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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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Being dead's only a problem if you know you're dead, which you never do because you're dead!
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