Jonathan Franzen

Patty believed that parents have a duty to teach their children how to recognize reality when they see it. ↗

— Jonathan Franzen

#page- #freedom

Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people. ↗

— Jonathan Franzen

#co-dependence #divorce #idealism #idealists #marriage

The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage. ↗

— Jonathan Franzen

#personality #dreams

It’s great that a song now costs exactly the same as a pack of gum and lasts exactly the same amount of time before it loses its flavour and you have to spend another buck. ↗

— Jonathan Franzen

#mp #music

But she was seventeen now and not actually dumb. She knew that you could love somebody more than anything and still not love the person all that much, if you were busy with other things. ↗

— Jonathan Franzen

#business

Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude. ↗

— Jonathan Franzen

#writing-inspiration #writing-philosophy #inspirational

It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction. ↗

— Jonathan Franzen

#internet

Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity. ↗

— Jonathan Franzen

#integrity #isolation #reading #self-knowledge #social-change

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. ↗

— Jonathan Franzen

#i #forgiveness

Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan. ↗

— Jonathan Franzen

#new-york-city