And did the distress I was feeling derive from some internal sickness of the soul, or was it imposed on me by the sickness of society? That someone besides me had suffered from these ambiguities and had seen light on their far side... that I could find company and consolation and hope in an object pulled almost at random from a bookshelf—felt akin to an instance of religious grace.

— Jonathan Franzen

And if the world refused to square with his version of reality then it was necessarily an uncaring world, a sour and sickening world, a penal colony, and he was doomed to be violently lonely in it. He bowed his head at the thought of how much strength a man would need to survive an entire life so lonely.

— Jonathan Franzen

And yet the feeling of injustice itself turned out to be strangely physical. Even realer, in a way, than a hurting, smelling, sweating body. Injustice had a shape, an weight, and a temperature, and a texture, and a very bad taste.

— Jonathan Franzen

An odd thing about beauty, however, is that it's absence tends not to arouse our sympathy as much as other forms of privation do.

— Jonathan Franzen

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

— Jonathan Franzen

By now it was too late to call St. Jude. He chose an out-of-the-way patch of airport carpeting and lay it down to sleep. He didn't understand what had happened to him. Furthermore, he felt like a piece of paper that had once had coherent writing on it but had been through the wash. Furthermore, he felt roughened, bleached and worn out along the fold lines. Furthermore, he semi-dreamed of disembodied eyes and isolated mouths in ski masks. Furthermore, he'd lost track of what he wanted, and since whom a person was what a person wanted, you could say that he'd lost track of himself.

— Jonathan Franzen

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

Every good writer I know needs to go into some deep, quiet place to do work that is fully imagined. And what the Internet brings is lots of vulgar data. It is the antithesis of the imagination. It leaves nothing to the imagination.

— Jonathan Franzen

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

— Jonathan Franzen

[H]er mind was like a balloon with static cling, attracting random ideas as they floated by[.]

— Jonathan Franzen