“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.” LoveDespairMortality Author:Jonathan Franzen
“A navigational beacon in Katz's black Levi's, a long-dormant transmitter buried by a more advanced civilization, was sparking back to life. Where he ought to have felt guilty, he instead was getting hard. Oh, the clairvoyance of the dick: it could see the future in a heartbeat, leaving the brain to play catch-up and find the necessary route from occluded present to preordained outcome. Katz could see that Patty, in the seemingly random life-meanderings that Walter had just described to him, had in fact deliberately been trampling symbols in a cornfield, spelling out a message unreadable to Walter at ground level but clear as could be to Katz at great height: IT'S NOT OVER, IT'S NOT OVER.” LoveDepressionBetrayal Author:Jonathan Franzen
“You can all supply your own favorite, most nauseating examples of the commodification of love. Mine include the wedding industry, TV ads that feature cute young children or the giving of automobiles as Christmas presents, and the particularly grotesque equation of diamond jewelry with everlasting devotion. The message, in each case, is that if you love somebody you should buy stuff. A related phenomenon is the ongoing transformation, courtesy of Facebook, of the verb 'to like' from a state of mind to an action that you perform with your computer mouse: from a feeling to an assertion of consumer choice. And liking, in general, is commercial culture's substitution for loving.” LoveLikeCommodificationLiking Book:Farther Away Source: Farther Away
“Parents are programmed to want the best for their kids, regardless of what they get in return. That's what love is supposed to be like, right? But in fact, if you think about it, that's kind of a strange belief. Given what we know about the way people really are. Selfish and shortsighted and egotistical and needy. Why should being a parent, in and of itself, somehow confer superior-personhood on everybody who tries it? Obviously it doesn't.” LoveChildrenSelfishnessParenthoodNeedinessFranzen Book:Freedom Source: Freedom
“She was a little bit in love with Tom, too, because she could afford to be, because she wasn't physically attracted to him - he was both older and 'safe'.” LoveFranzen Book:Purity Source: Purity
“Her life would have been easier if she hadn't loved him so much, but she couldn't help loving him. Just to look at him was to love him.” LoveLove QuotesMarriageRelationships QuotesJonathan FranzenVicissitudes Of LifeThe Corrections Book:The corrections Source: The corrections
“He was lovable the way a child is lovable, and he was capable of returning love with a childlike purity. If love is nevertheless excluded from his work, it's because he never quite felt that he deserved to receive it. He was a lifelong prisoner on the island of himself. What looked like gentle contours from a distance were in fact sheer cliffs. Sometimes only a little of him was crazy, sometimes nearly all of him, but, as an adult, he was never entirely not crazy. What he'd seen of his id while trying to escape his island prison by way of drugs and alcohol, only to find himself even more imprisoned by addiction, seems never to have ceased to be corrosive of his belief in his lovability. Even after he got clean, even decades after his late-adolescent suicide attempt, even after his slow and heroic construction of a life for himself, he felt undeserving. And this feeling was intertwined, ultimately to the point of indistinguishability, with the thought of suicide, which was the one sure way out of his imprisonment; surer than addiction, surer than fiction, and surer, finally, than love.” LoveWritingSelf EsteemSuicideAddictionSelf ConfidenceMental IllnessDesperationDavid Foster Wallace Author:Jonathan Franzen
“[T]o 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.” IfsLovePersonsSelfJoyStruggleSelf LoveSurrender Author:Jonathan Franzen
