Heart Quotes by Jonathan Franzen

Just as the camera draws a stake through the heart of serious portraiture, television has killed the novel of social reportage.

— Jonathan Franzen

...She felt that nothing could kill her hope now, nothing. She was seventy-five and she was going to make some changes in…

— Jonathan Franzen

“Her very difficulty created friction, and friction led to satisfaction...”

— Jonathan Franzen

He couldn't figure out if she was immensely well adjusted or seriously messed up.

— Jonathan Franzen

she was so much a personality and so little anything else that even staring straight at her he had no idea what…

— Jonathan Franzen

“The lump in his throat was evidence of how much, in spite of everything, he still loved her.”

— Jonathan Franzen

“She had all day every day to figure out some decent and satisfying way to live, and yet all she ever seemed…

— Jonathan Franzen

“Taking a cab to the city center, she was pierced unexpectedly by regret for not doing exactly that: not walking the streets…

— Jonathan Franzen

“although in truth her passivity was calculated, because she knew passivity inflamed him. He had her, and to some extent she wanted…

— Jonathan Franzen

Patty knew, in her heart, that he was wrong in his impression of her. And the mistake she went to go on…

— Jonathan Franzen

I guess my life hasn’t always been happy, or easy, or exactly what I want. At a certain point, I just have…

— Jonathan Franzen

Life, in her experience, had a kind of velvet luster. You looked at yourself from one perspective and all you saw was…

— Jonathan Franzen

Everything he'd done with regard to her in the last three years had been calculated to foreclose the intensely personal sort of…

— Jonathan Franzen

Only in my 40s did I become a person whose heart lifts whenever he hears a grosbeak singing or a towhee calling,…

— Jonathan Franzen

Walter had never liked cats. They'd seemed to him the sociopaths of the pet world, a species domesticated as an evil necessary…

— Jonathan Franzen

Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are.…

— Jonathan Franzen