15 Jonathan Franzen quotes to get you excited for ‘Purity’
His latest novel comes out Tuesday.
Jonathan Franzen’s new novel comes out Tuesday. If you read, you probably have strong feelings about him.
On one hand, he won the National Book Award. He’s an avid birdwatcher and environmentalist. He penned a graduation speech that went viral in 2011.
On the other hand, he recently mentioned a little too-offhandedly that he considered adopting an Iraqi war orphan to help him understand young people better. His feud with Oprah in 2001 was well-publicized. Feminists have also accused him of being less-than enlightened in his treatment of women.
But whether you re-read Freedom once a year or think The Corrections is a piece of garbage, Franzen’s relevance in the modern literary scene is indisputable.
Here are 15 quotes from earlier Franzen works that are guaranteed to strike a chord and convince you to give Purity a try.
1. “This wasn’t the person he’d thought he was, or would have chosen to be if he’d been free to choose, but there was something comforting and liberating about being an actual definite someone, rather than a collection of contradictory potential someones.’’ ― Freedom
2. “And when the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight—isn’t that a strange thing? That absolutely nothing changes except that you see things differently and you’re less fearful and less anxious and generally stronger as a result: isn’t it amazing that a completely invisible thing in your head can feel realer than anything you’ve experienced before? You see things more clearly and you know that you’re seeing them more clearly. And it comes to you that this is what it means to love life, this is all anybody who talks seriously about God is ever talking about. Moments like this.’’ ― The Corrections
2. “You may be poor, but the one thing nobody can take away from you is the freedom to f*** up your life whatever way you want to.’’ ― Freedom
3. “Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are. And this is why love, as I understand it, is always specific. Trying to love all of humanity may be a worthy endeavor, but, in a funny way, it keeps the focus on the self, on the self’s own moral or spiritual well-being. Whereas, to 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.’’ ― Liking Is For Cowrads. Go For What Hurts
4. “Can a better kind of fiction save the world? There’s always some tiny hope (strange things do happen), but the answer is almost certainly no, it can’t. There is some reasonable chance, however, that it could save your soul. If you’re unhappy about the hatred that’s been unleashed in your heart, you might try imagining what it’s like to be the person who hates you; you might consider the possibility that you are, in fact, the Evil One yourself.’’ ― Farther Away
5. “Elective ignorance was a great survival skill, perhaps the greatest.’’ ― The Corrections
6. “ Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular. But the realism is merely a mask for depression’s actual essence, which is an overwhelming estrangement from humanity. The more persuaded you are of your unique access to the rottenness, the more afraid you become of engaging with the world; and the less you engage with the world, the more perfidiously happy-faced the rest of humanity seems for continuing to engage with it.’’ ― How to Be Alone
7. “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.’’ ― Freedom
8. “There’s hardly anybody who doesn’t hate somebody now, and nobody at all whom somebody doesn’t hate.’’ ― Farther Away
9. “But nothing disturbs the feeling of specialness like the presence of other human beings feeling identically special.’’ ― Freedom
10. “If multiculturalism succeeds in making us a nation of independently empowered tribes, each tribe will be deprived of the comfort of victimhood and be forced to confront human limitation for what it is: a fixture of life.’’ ― How to Be Alone
11. “Adolescence is best enjoyed without self-consciousness, but self-consciousness, unfortunately, is its leading symptom. Even when something important happens to you, even when your heart’s getting crushed or exalted, even when you’re absorbed in building the foundations of a personality, there comes these moments when you’re aware that what’s happening is not the real story. Unless you actually die, the real story is still ahead of you. This alone, this cruel mixture of consciousness and irrelevance, this built-in hollowness, is enough to account for how pissed off you are. You’re miserable and ashamed if you don’t believe your adolescent troubles matter, but you’re stupid if you do.’’ ― The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History
12. “Life, in her experience, had a kind of velvet luster. You looked at yourself from one perspective and all you saw was weirdness. Move your head a little bit, though, and everything looked reasonably normal.’’ ― The Corrections
13. “There is, after all, a kind of happiness in unhappiness, if it’s the right unhappiness.’’ ― Freedom
14. How wrong to have been so negative, how wrong to have been so gloomy, how wrong to have run away from life, how wrong to have said no, again and again, instead of yes.’’ ― The Corrections
15. “His tiredness hurt so much it kept him awake.’’ ― The Corrections
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