Time stops for the duration of a cigarette: when you’re smoking, you’re acutely present to yourself; you step outside the unconscious rush of life. This is why the condemned are allowed a final cigarette... it’s a lot easier to leave the world if you’re certain that you have really been in it.

— Jonathan Franzen

Jonathan Franzen Quotes

Yes, but that’s because you’re not poor. When you’re poor, things just happen to you. You feel like you can’t control anything. You’re completely at God’s mercy. That’s why Jesus tells us that the poor are blessed – because having nothing brings you closer to God.” “That woman didn’t strike me as being especially close to God.

— Jonathan Franzen

Your father doesn’t look to our Savior but to what other men think of him. He preaches love but holds a grudge like no mans business.

— Jonathan Franzen

It occurred to her that the Perry in her head had been nothing but a sentimental projection, extrapolated from the little boy he’d been. She didn’t know the real Perry any more than Russ knew the real her. “How.

— Jonathan Franzen

It was unfair to have enjoyed her body when she was young and then burdened her with children and a thousand duties, only to now feel miserable whenever he had to venture into public with her and her sorry hair, her unavailing makeup, her seemingly self-spiting choice of dress. He pitied her for the unfairness; he felt guilty. But he couldn’t help blaming her, too, because her unattractiveness advertised unhappiness.

— Jonathan Franzen

A noseful of Cottrell ought to have sobered her, but somehow everything was interchangeable.

— Jonathan Franzen

I think badness is the fundamental condition of humanity.

— Jonathan Franzen

According to Scripture, earthly life was but a moment, but the moment seemed spacious when he was with her.

— Jonathan Franzen

There was a kind of liberation in jettisoning all thought of being a good person.

— Jonathan Franzen

And so began the remainder of her life.

— Jonathan Franzen

Marion stepped up to the counter and surveyed the candy-bar display with militant loathing.

— Jonathan Franzen

In the hush of the emptied campus, he could faintly hear the mightiness of Illinois, the rumble of a freight train, the moan of eighteen-wheelers, coal transported from the south, car parts from the north, fattened livestock and staggering corn yields from the middle, all roads leading to the broad-shouldered city on the lake.

— Jonathan Franzen

The perfect gift for the man who had everything was a quarter-ounce bottle of feminism.

— Jonathan Franzen

Perhaps the soul was one of those tools built to do exactly one specific task, to know that I am I, and was mutable with respect to all other forms of knowledge?

— Jonathan Franzen

You have some fine qualities, but imagination was never one of them.

— Jonathan Franzen

I’m the fat little humiliation he’s married to.

— Jonathan Franzen

The whole notion of coolness was puerile.

— Jonathan Franzen

It was strange that self-pity wasn’t on the list of deadly sins; none was deadlier.

— Jonathan Franzen

She’d seen enough of socialism to foresee its ultimate failure, she knew the Soviets to be thieves, rapists, and murderers, and she never got over the shock of discovering that my father was rich only in comparison to Jena, only the way most Americans were rich.

— Jonathan Franzen

Clem couldn’t stand to be in the same room with him. He was giving up his student deferment to show his father what a strong man did.

— Jonathan Franzen

Evil had pursued her all her life, and now the world was exploding with the color of it, and nowhere was there refuge.

— Jonathan Franzen
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