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There is, after all, a kind of happiness in unhappiness, if it's the right unhappiness.

Jonathan Franzen

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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
Happiness
Right
Kind
Heartbreak
Unhappiness

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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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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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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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It's healthy to say uncle when your bone's about to break.
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The writer’s life is a life of revisions.
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Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.
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I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.
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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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This evening I begin a notebook. If anyone reads this, I trust they will forgive my overuse of I. I can't stop it. I'm writing this.
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I feel as if I'm clearly part of a trend among writers who take themselves seriously - and I confess to taking myself as seriously as the next writer.
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Then she waited, with parted lips and a saucy challenge in her eyes, to see how her presence -- the drama of being her -- was registering. In the way of such chicks, she seemed convinced of the originality of her provocation.
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Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.
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Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people.
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I was a late child from my parents, so I grew up surrounded by people a lot older than me. I think even when I was 21, I felt like I was a 70-year-old man.
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So, what, you got cigarette burns, too? Gitanes said. Chip showed his palm, It's nothing. Self-inflicted. You pathetic American. Different kind of prison Chip said.
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You see more sitting still than chasing after.
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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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How wrong to have been so negative, how wrong to have been so gloomy, how wrong to have run away from life, how wrong to have said no, again and again, instead of yes.
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I used to think it was hard to write, and I still find the process more or less unpleasant, but if I know what I'm doing it rattles along, then the rewrite whips it into shape rather quickly.
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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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