01c. 1959 ADOnly in a crowded, diverse place like New York, surrounded by strangeness, do I come home to myself.Jonathan Franzen / quote ↗
02c. 1959 ADThe reason they outperformed her was that they accepted each new “product” without trying to understand it. They got behind the new pitch wholeheartedly, even when it was risible and/or made no sense, and then, if a prospective customer had trouble understanding the “product,” they didn’t vocally agree that it sure was difficult to understand, didn’t make a good-faith effort to explain the complicated reasoning behind it, but simply kept hammering on the written pitch. And clearly this was the path to success, and it was all a double disillusionment to Pip, who not only felt actively punished for using her brain but was presented every month with fresh evidence that Bay Area consumers on average responded better to a rote and semi-nonsensical pitch than to a well-meaning saleswoman trying to help them understand the offer.Jonathan Franzen / quote ↗
03c. 1959 ADThe mark of a legitimate revolution - the scientific, for example - was that it didn't brag about its revolutionariness but simply occurred.Jonathan Franzen / quote ↗
04c. 1959 ADWalter 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 peopleJonathan Franzen / quote ↗
05c. 1959 ADThe fundamental fact about all of us is that we’re alive for a while but will die before long. This fact is the real root cause of all our anger and pain and despair. And you can either run from this fact or, by way of love, you can embrace it.Jonathan Franzen / quote ↗
06c. 1959 ADTom's theory of why human beings had yet to receive any message from extraterrestrial intelligences was that all civilizations, without exception, blew themselves up almost as soon as they were able to get a message out, never lasting more than a few decades in a galaxy whose age was billions; blinking in and out of existence so fast that, even if the galaxy abounded with earthlike planets, the chances of one civilization sticking around to get a message from another were vanishingly low, because it was too damned easy to split the atom.Jonathan Franzen / quote ↗
07c. 1959 ADHow could I have thought that I needed to cure myself in order to fit into the 'real' world? I didn't need curing, and the world didn't, either; the only thing that did need curing was my understanding of my place in it. Without that understanding - without a sense of belonging to the real world - it was impossible to thrive in an imagined one.Jonathan Franzen / quote ↗
08c. 1959 ADHe was certifiably insane, an Ayn Rander who fancied himself an Übermensch and “the Singularity’s chosen avatar,Jonathan Franzen / quote ↗
09c. 1959 ADPip wondered what the secret was of being different in a way that attracted people, as opposed to her own way.Jonathan Franzen / quote ↗
11c. 1959 ADBrooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan.Jonathan Franzen / quote ↗
12c. 1959 ADAnd 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 / quote ↗
14c. 1959 ADthere are few things harder to imagine than other people’s conversations about yourself.Jonathan Franzen / quote ↗
