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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.

Jonathan Franzen

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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
Person
Struggles
Self
Joys
Love
Identify
Specific
Surrender
Joy
Struggle
Persons

More quotes by Jonathan Franzen

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Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.
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Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan.
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I can't stomach any kind of notion that serious fiction is good for us, because I don't believe that everything that's wrong with the world has a cure.
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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.
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He became another data point in the American experiment of self-government, an experiment statistically skewed from the outset, because it wasn't the people with sociable genes who fled the crowded Old World for the new continent it was the people who didn't get along well with others.
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I feel that working environmentalists are, in the main, happier than armchair environmentalists.
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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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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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There is, after all, a kind of happiness in unhappiness, if it's the right unhappiness.
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Popularity has become its own justification.
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The writer’s life is a life of revisions.
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Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance
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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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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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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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He had a happy canine way of seeking approval without seeming insecure.
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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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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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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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His tiredness hurt so much it kept him awake.
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