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Jonathan Franzen Quotes

Total quotes: 13
“But the first lesson reading teaches is how to be alone.”
— Jonathan Franzen, How to Be Alone: Essays
Tagged: Loneliness
“How do you know that you’re a person, distinct from other people? By keeping certain things to yourself. You guard them inside you, because, if you don’t, there’s no distinction between inside and outside. Secrets are the way you know you even have an inside. ”
— Jonathan Franzen, Purity: A Novel
Tagged: The Secret of Secrecy, Identity
“I haven't googled myself since the fall of 2001.”
— Jonathan Franzen, Scratch
Tagged: Books, Money, Writers, Writers and money, Quote of the Moment
“I wanted all of her and resented other boys for wanting any part of her.”
— Jonathan Franzen, The Discomfort Zone: A Personal Journey
Tagged: Love, Loving Someone, Loving Her, liking someone, Loving, liking, Desire, Jealousy
“Why should Apple shareholders be getting rich while working journalists are getting fired? This is an unjust situation, and the libertarians in Silicon Valley are either moral idiots or liars.”
— Jonathan Franzen, Scratch
Tagged: Books, Money, Writers, Writers and money, Technology, The Digital Age
“I guess my life hasn’t always been happy, or easy, or exactly what I wanted. At a certain point, I just have to try not to think too much about certain things, or else they’ll break my heart.”
— Jonathan Franzen, Freedom: A Novel(Oprah's Book Club)
Tagged: Life, Brokenness
“Few things were more alike than one revolution to another. Then again, he’d experienced only the kind that loudly called itself a revolution. The mark of a legitimate revolution— the scientific, for example— was that it didn’t brag about its revolutionariness but simply occurred.”
— Jonathan Franzen, Purity: A Novel
Tagged: Revolution, Change, Violently Silent
“It was Andreas’s gift, maybe his greatest, to find singular niches in totalitarian regimes. The Stasi was the best friend he’d ever had— until he met the Internet... The New Regime even recycled the old Republic’s buzzwords, collective, collaborative.”
— Jonathan Franzen, Purity: A Novel
Tagged: The Night After The Revolution, Inherent Control
“The internet is all about destroying the elite, destroying the gatekeepers. The people know best. You take that to its conclusion, and you get Donald Trump. What do those Washington insiders know? What does the elite know? What do papers like The New York Times know? Listen, the people know what’s right”
— Jonathan Franzen
Tagged: Gatekeepers, Digital media, Popularity vs. Importance, Cultural Elitism vs. Democratic Consumerism
“You have to love before you can be relentless.”
— Jonathan Franzen, Jonathan Franzen’s 10 Rules for Novelists
Tagged: Um, LOL, Writing, Writers
“He had only an intolerable, chest-crushing anxiety.”
— Jonathan Franzen, Purity: A Novel
Tagged: what anxiety feels like, anxiety in literature, Feelings, Life, humanity, Soul
“Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people.”
— Jonathan Franzen, Freedom
Tagged: Love, Dating, Relationships, H4D-10
“Lenin had been a risk-taker. Trotsky had been one, too, until Stalin had made him the Bill Gates of the Soviet Union, the excoriated crypto-reactionary. But Stalin himself hadn’t needed to take so many risks, because terror worked better. Although, to a man, the new revolutionaries all claimed to worship risk-taking— a relative term in any case, since the risk in question was of losing some venture capitalist’s money, at worst of wasting a few parentally funded years, rather than, say, the risk of being shot or hanged— the most successful of them had instead followed Stalin’s example. Like the old politburos, the new politburo styled itself as the enemy of the elite and the friend of the masses, dedicated to giving consumers what they wanted, but to Andreas (who, admittedly, had never learned how to want stuff) it seemed as if the Internet was governed more by fear: the fear of unpopularity and uncoolness, the fear of missing out, the fear of being flamed or forgotten. In the Republic, people had been terrified of the state; under the New Regime, what terrified them was the state of nature: kill or be killed, eat or be eaten. In both cases, the fear was entirely reasonable; indeed, it was the product of reason. The full name of the Republic’s ideology had been Scientific Socialism, a name pointing backward to la Terreur (the Jacobins, with their marvelously efficient guillotine, may have been executioners, but they fashioned themselves as executors of Enlightenment rationality) and forward to the terrors of technocracy, which sought to liberate humanity from its humanness through the efficiency of markets and the rationality of machines. This was the truly eternal fixture of illegitimate revolution, this impatience with irrationality, this wish to be clean of it once and for all.”
— Jonathan Franzen, Purity: A Novel
Tagged: Risk Taking, Seduction of Unreason, Terror, Web Economics
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