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Jonathan Franzen Quotes

Total quotes: 8
“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, Purity: A Novel
Tagged: The Secret of Secrecy, Identity
“Oh pussycat, I’m so glad to hear your voice,’ the girl’s mother said on the telephone.”
— Jonathan Franzen, Purity: A Novel
Tagged: first lines of books, Moms Calling Daughters
“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, Purity: A Novel
Tagged: Revolution, Change, Violently Silent
“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, Purity: A Novel
Tagged: The Night After The Revolution, Inherent Control
“He had only an intolerable, chest-crushing anxiety.”
— Jonathan Franzen, Purity: A Novel
Tagged: what anxiety feels like, anxiety in literature, Feelings, Life, humanity, Soul
“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 gaze, but when he came home he found a person with no resemblance to the object he’d desired.”
— Jonathan Franzen, Purity: A Novel
Tagged: This Is Love, Ideals, Fantasy
“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 Internet. In fact, he simply meant a system that was impossible to opt out of. The old Republic had certainly excelled at surveillance and parades, but the essence of its totalitarianism had been more everyday and subtle. You could cooperate with the system or you could oppose it, but the one thing you could never do, whether you were enjoying a secure and pleasant life or sitting in a prison, was not be in relation to it. The answer to every question large or small was socialism. If you substituted networks for socialism, you got the Internet. Its competing platforms were united in their ambition to define every term of your existence.”
— Jonathan Franzen, Purity: A Novel
Tagged: Totalitarian, Central Control, No Way Out, Surveillance State, The Iron Curtain of the Web, The Ironclad Web
“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 worship risk-taking— a relative term in any case, since the risk in question was of losing some venture capitalist’s money, at worst of wasting a few parentally funded years, rather than, say, the risk of being shot or hanged— the most successful of them had instead followed Stalin’s example. Like the old politburos, the new politburo styled itself as the enemy of the elite and the friend of the masses, dedicated to giving consumers what they wanted, but to Andreas (who, admittedly, had never learned how to want stuff) it seemed as if the Internet was governed more by fear: the fear of unpopularity and uncoolness, the fear of missing out, the fear of being flamed or forgotten. In the Republic, people had been terrified of the state; under the New Regime, what terrified them was the state of nature: kill or be killed, eat or be eaten. In both cases, the fear was entirely reasonable; indeed, it was the product of reason. The full name of the Republic’s ideology had been Scientific Socialism, a name pointing backward to la Terreur (the Jacobins, with their marvelously efficient guillotine, may have been executioners, but they fashioned themselves as executors of Enlightenment rationality) and forward to the terrors of technocracy, which sought to liberate humanity from its humanness through the efficiency of markets and the rationality of machines. This was the truly eternal fixture of illegitimate revolution, this impatience with irrationality, this wish to be clean of it once and for all.”
— Jonathan Franzen, Purity: A Novel
Tagged: Risk Taking, Seduction of Unreason, Terror, Web Economics
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