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Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance

Jonathan Franzen

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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
Across
Fiction
Strangers
Way
Connect
Time
Effective
Stranger
Particularly
Distance

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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.
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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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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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Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.
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It's healthy to say uncle when your bone's about to break.
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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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Integrity's a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They're pure hyena.
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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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Without privacy there was no point in being an individual.
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We may freak out globally, but we suffer locally.
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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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The figure of my father looms large in my imagination.
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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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He had a happy canine way of seeking approval without seeming insecure.
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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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But nothing disturbs the feeling of specialness like the presence of other human beings feeling identically special.
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I was about 13, in some ways, when I wrote the first book. Approximately 18 when I wrote the second.
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I really enjoy doing both, but I didn't write nonfiction until 1994.
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Since our technology is really just an extension of ourselves, we don’t have to have contempt for its manipulability in the way we might with actual people. It’s all one big endless loop. We like the mirror and the mirror likes us. To friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors.
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