The Astor's and the Vanderbilt's, their pleasure domes and money: she was sick of it. Sick of envying, sick of herself. She didn't understand antiques or architecture, she couldn't draw like Sylvia, she didn't read like Ted, she had few interests and no expertise. A paucity for love was the only true thing she'd ever had.

— Jonathan Franzen

THE CORRECTION, when it finally came, was not an overnight bursting of a bubble but a much more gentle letdown, a year-long leakage of value from key financial markets, a contraction too gradual to generate headlines and too predictable to seriously hurt anybody but fools and the working poor.

— Jonathan Franzen

The fundamental fact about all of us is that we’re alive for a while but will die before long. This fact is the real root cause of all our anger and pain and despair. And you can either run from this fact or, by way of love, you can embrace it.

— Jonathan Franzen

Their marriages had been Old Testament, hers a matter of honoring her covenant with Charles, Tom's a matter of fearing Anabel's wrath and judgement. In the New Testament, the only things that mattered were love and free will.

— Jonathan Franzen

The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through...ringing throughout the house was an alarm bell that no one but Alfred and Enid could hear directly.

— Jonathan Franzen

The mark of a legitimate revolution - the scientific, for example - was that it didn't brag about its revolutionaries but simply occurred.

— Jonathan Franzen

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

The problem with making a virtual world of oneself is akin to the problem with projecting ourselves onto a cyberworld: there’s no end of virtual spaces in which to seek stimulation, but their very endlessness, the perpetual stimulation without satisfaction, becomes imprisoning.

— Jonathan Franzen

There are few things harder to imagine than other people’s conversations about yourself.

— Jonathan Franzen

The reason they outperformed her was that they accepted each new “product” without trying to understand it. They got behind the new pitch wholeheartedly, even when it was risible and/or made no sense, and then, if a prospective customer had trouble understanding the “product,” they didn’t vocally agree that it sure was difficult to understand, didn’t make a good-faith effort to explain the complicated reasoning behind it, but simply kept hammering on the written pitch. And clearly this was the path to success, and it was all a double disillusionment to Pip, who not only felt actively punished for using her brain but was presented every month with fresh evidence that Bay Area consumers on average responded better to a rote and semi-nonsensical pitch than to a well-meaning saleswoman trying to help them understand the offer.

— Jonathan Franzen