“He had only an intolerable, chest-crushing anxiety.”— Jonathan Franzen, amazon.comTagged: what anxiety feels like, anxiety in literature, Feelings, Life, humanity
“Oh pussycat, I’m so glad to hear your voice,’ the girl’s mother said on the telephone.”— Jonathan Franzen, amazon.comTagged: first lines of books, Moms Calling Daughters
“Lenin had been a risk-taker. Trotsky had been one, too, until Stalin had made him the Bill Gates of the Soviet Union, the excoriated crypto-reactionary. But Stalin himself hadn’t needed to take so many risks, because terror worked better. Although, to a man, the new revolutionaries all claimed to wo…”— Jonathan Franzen, amazon.comTagged: Risk Taking, Seduction of Unreason, Terror, Web Economics
“It was Andreas’s gift, maybe his greatest, to find singular niches in totalitarian regimes. The Stasi was the best friend he’d ever had— until he met the Internet... The New Regime even recycled the old Republic’s buzzwords, collective, collaborative.”— Jonathan Franzen, amazon.comTagged: The Night After The Revolution, Inherent Control
“He indulged it at first, trying to be a good man, trying to live up to an ideal image that he, too, still had of himself, but there was finally no way around it: endless discussion with a humorless twenty-three-year-old bored him. During the day, when they were apart, he kept picturing her solemn ga…”— Jonathan Franzen, amazon.comTagged: This Is Love, Ideals, Fantasy
“Few things were more alike than one revolution to another. Then again, he’d experienced only the kind that loudly called itself a revolution. The mark of a legitimate revolution— the scientific, for example— was that it didn’t brag about its revolutionariness but simply occurred.”— Jonathan Franzen, amazon.comTagged: Revolution, Change, Violently Silent
“How do you know that you’re a person, distinct from other people? By keeping certain things to yourself. You guard them inside you, because, if you don’t, there’s no distinction between inside and outside. Secrets are the way you know you even have an inside.”— Jonathan Franzen, amazon.comTagged: The Secret of Secrecy, Identity
“Before he’d quit doing interviews, the previous fall, he’d taken to dropping the word totalitarian. Younger interviewers, to whom the word meant total surveillance, total mind control, gray armies in parade with medium-range missiles, had understood him to be saying something unfair about the Intern…”— Jonathan Franzen, amazon.comTagged: Totalitarian, Central Control, No Way Out, Surveillance State, The Iron Curtain of the Web