Home > Work > Freedom

Freedom QUOTES

Freedom QUOTES

1 " Patty believed that parents have a duty to teach their children how to recognize reality when they see it. "

― Jonathan Franzen , Freedom

2 " The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage. "

― Jonathan Franzen , Freedom

3 " Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people. "

― Jonathan Franzen , Freedom

4 " the weekly thirty minutes of sexual stress was a chronic but low-grade discomfort, like the humidity in Florida "

― Jonathan Franzen , Freedom

5 " Parents are programmed to want the best for their kids, regardless of what they get in return. That's what love is supposed to be like, right? But in fact, if you think about it, that's kind of a strange belief. Given what we know about the way people really are. Selfish and shortsighted and egotistical and needy. Why should being a parent, in and of itself, somehow confer superior-personhood on everybody who tries it? Obviously it doesn't. "

― Jonathan Franzen , Freedom

6 " I think the iPod is the true face of Republican politics, and I’m in favor of the music industry … standing up proud and saying it out loud: We in the Chiclet-manufacturing business are not about social justice, …we’re not about a coherent set of national ideals, we’re not about wisdom. We’re about choosing what WE want to listen to and ignoring everything else…. We’re about giving ourselves a mindless feel-good treat every five minutes. …We’re about persuading ten-year-old children to spend twenty-five dollars on a cool little silicone iPod case that costs a licensed Apple Computer subsidiary thirty-nine cents to manufacture. "

― Jonathan Franzen , Freedom

7 " She had all day every day to figure out some decent and satisfying way to live, and yet all she ever seemed to get for all her choices and all her freedom was more miserable. The autobiographer is almost forced to the conclusion that she pitied herself for being so free. "

― Jonathan Franzen , Freedom

8 " Walter had never liked cats. They'd seemed to him the sociopaths of the pet world, a species domesticated as an evil necessary for the control of rodents and subsequently fetishized the way unhappy countries fetishize their militaries, saluting the uniforms of killers as cat owners stroke their animals' lovely fur and forgive their claws and fangs. He'd never seen anything in a cat's face but simpering incuriosity and self-interest; you only had to tease one with a mouse-toy to see where it's true heart lay...cats were all about using people "

― Jonathan Franzen , Freedom

9 " And yet the feeling of injustice itself turned out to be strangely physical. Even realer, in a way, than a her hurting, smelling, sweating body. Injustice had a shape, an a weight, and a temperature, and a texture, and a very bad taste. "

― Jonathan Franzen , Freedom

10 " there are few things harder to imagine than other people’s conversations about yourself. "

― Jonathan Franzen , Freedom

11 " You may be poor, but the one thing nobody can take away from you is the freedom to fuck up your life whatever way you want to. "

― Jonathan Franzen , Freedom

12 " There is, after all, a kind of happiness in unhappiness, if it's the right unhappiness. "

― Jonathan Franzen , Freedom

13 " It’s all circling around the same problem of personal liberties,” Walter said. “People came to this country for either money or freedom. If you don’t have money, you cling to your freedoms all the more angrily. Even if smoking kills you, even if you can’t afford to feed your kids, even if your kids are getting shot down by maniacs with assault rifles. You may be poor, but the one thing nobody can take away from you is the freedom to fuck up your life whatever way you want to. "

― Jonathan Franzen , Freedom

14 " This wasn't the person he'd thought he was, or would have chosen to be if he'd been free to choose, but there was something comforting and liberating about being an actual definite someone, rather than a collection of contradictory potential someones. "

― Jonathan Franzen , Freedom

15 " I guess my life hasn’t always been happy, or easy, or exactly what I want. At a certain point, I just have to try not to think too much about certain things, or else they’ll break my heart. "

― Jonathan Franzen , Freedom

16 " But nothing disturbs the feeling of specialness like the presence of other human beings feeling identically special. "

― Jonathan Franzen , Freedom

17 " Integrity's a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They're pure hyena. "

― Jonathan Franzen , Freedom

18 " But she was seventeen now and not actually dumb. She knew that you could love somebody more than anything and still not love the person all that much, if you were busy with other things. "

― Jonathan Franzen , Freedom

19 " There's a hazardous sadness to the first sounds of someone else's work in the morning; it's as if stillness experiences pain in being broken. "

― Jonathan Franzen , Freedom

20 " I admire your capacity for admiring. "

― Jonathan Franzen , Freedom