He and his wife loved each other and brought each other daily pain. Everything else he was doing in his life, even his longing for Lalitha, amounted to little more than flight from circumstance. He and Patty couldn't live together and couldn't imagine living apart. Each time he thought they'd reached the unbearable breaking point, it turned out that there was still further they could go without breaking.
Jonathan FranzenNell Zink is a writer of extraordinary talent and range. Her work insistently raises the possibility that the world is larger and stranger than the world you think you know.
Jonathan FranzenDepression, when it's clinical, is not a metaphor. It runs in families, and it's known to respond to medication and to counseling. However truly you believe there's a sickness to existence that can never be cured, if you're depressed you will sooner or later surrender and say: I just don't want to feel bad anymore. The shift from depressive realism to tragic realism, from being immobilized by darkness to being sustained by it, thus strangely seems to require believing in the possibility of a cure.
Jonathan FranzenThen she waited, with parted lips and a saucy challenge in her eyes, to see how her presence -- the drama of being her -- was registering. In the way of such chicks, she seemed convinced of the originality of her provocation.
Jonathan FranzenThe reason this system canโt be overthrown in this country,โ Walter said, โis all about freedom. The reason the free market in Europe is tempered by socialism is that theyโre not so hung up on personal liberties there. They also have lower population growth rates, despite comparable income levels. The Europans are all-around more rational, basically. And the conversation about rights in this country isnโt rational. Itโs taking place on the level of emotion, and class resentments, which is why the right is so good at exploiting it.
Jonathan Franzen