He watched a catbird hopping around in an azalea that was readying itself to bloom; he envied the bird for knowing nothing of what he knew; he would have swapped souls with it in a heartbeat. And then to take wing, to know the air's buoyancy even for an hour: the trad was a no-brainer, and the catbird, with its lively indifference to him, its sureness of physical selfhood, seemed well aware of how preferable it was to be the bird.

Jonathan Franzen

Categorized in : Air Knowing Nothing Azaleas

When you stay in your room and rage or sneer or shrug your shoulders, as I did for many years, the world and its problems are impossibly daunting. But when you go out and put yourself in real relation to real people, or even just real animals, there’s a very real danger that you might end up loving some of them. And who knows what might happen to you then?

Jonathan Franzen

real animal years

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.

Jonathan Franzen

heart trying thinking

The place of stillness that you have to go to to write, but also to read seriously, is the point where you can actually make responsible decisions, where you can actually engage productively with an otherwise scary and unmanageable world.

Jonathan Franzen

scary decision writing

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

Jonathan Franzen

solitude problem fiction

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.

Jonathan Franzen

real struggle spiritual

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

Jonathan Franzen

connections writing fiction

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.

Jonathan Franzen

desire forever mean

Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular.

Jonathan Franzen

realism particular world

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

Jonathan Franzen

distance way fiction

If you want to have friends, you have to remember that nobody's perfect.

Jonathan Franzen

perfect want remember

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

Jonathan Franzen

falling-in-love witty funny

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.

Jonathan Franzen

contradictory chosen comforting

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

limitless personality dream

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.

Jonathan Franzen

tribes succeed comfort

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.

Jonathan Franzen

unique essence depression

she was so much a personality and so little anything else that even staring straight at her he had no idea what she really looked like.

Jonathan Franzen

personality littles ideas

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.

Jonathan Franzen

said running negative

You're either reading a book or you're not.

Jonathan Franzen

reading book

I find it a huge strain to be responsible for my tastes and be known and defined by them.

Jonathan Franzen

strain responsible taste

Good novels are produced by people who voluntarily isolate themselves and go deep, and report from the depths on what they find.

Jonathan Franzen

novel depth people