He watched a catbird hopping around in an azalea that was readying itself to bloom; he envied the bird for knowing nothing of what he knew; he would have swapped souls with it in a heartbeat. And then to take wing, to know the air's buoyancy even for an hour: the trad was a no-brainer, and the catbird, with its lively indifference to him, its sureness of physical selfhood, seemed well aware of how preferable it was to be the bird.
Jonathan FranzenFor every reader who dies today, a viewer is born, and we seem to be witnessing . . . the final tipping balance.
Jonathan FranzenTo me, the point of a novel is to take you to a still place. You can multitask with a lot of things, but you canโt really multitask reading a book.
Jonathan FranzenFamily's the one thing you can't change. You can cover yourself with tattoos. You can get a grapefruit-sized ring going through your earlobe. You can change your name. You can move to a different continent. But you cannot change who your parents were, and who your siblings are, and who your children are.
Jonathan Franzen