Life, in her experience, had a kind of velvet luster. You looked at yourself from one perspective and all you saw was weirdness. Move your head a little bit, though, and everything looked reasonably normal.
Jonathan FranzenYou could slap his wrist for saying it, but then he said it with his face, and you could spank him for making faces, but then he said it with his eyes, and there were limits to correction-no way, in the end, to penetrate behind the blue irises and eradicate a boy's disgust.
Jonathan FranzenWhat he'd never understood about men in his position, in all the books he'd read and movies he'd seen about them, was clearer to him now: you couldn't keep expecting wholehearted love without, at some point, requiting it. There was no credit to be earned for simply being good.
Jonathan Franzen