How to Be Alone Quotes

“Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular. But the realism is merely a mask for depression's actual essence, which is an overwhelming estrangement from humanity. The more persuaded you are of your unique access to the rottenness, the more afraid you become of engaging with the world; and the less you engage with the world, the more perfidiously happy-faced the rest of humanity seems for continuing to engage with it.”
― Jonathan Franzen, How to Be Alone

“But the first lesson reading teaches is how to be alone.”
― Jonathan Franzen, How to Be Alone

“Imagine that human existence is defined by an Ache: the Ache of our not being, each of us, the center of the universe; of our desires forever outnumbering our means of satisfying them.”
― Jonathan Franzen, How to Be Alone

“The world was ending then, it's ending still, and I'm happy to belong to it again.”
― Jonathan Franzen, How To Be Alone

“For every reader who dies today, a viewer is born, and we seem to be witnessing . . . the final tipping balance.”
― Jonathan Franzen, How To Be Alone

“It's healthy to say uncle when your bone's about to break.”
― Jonathan Franzen, How to Be Alone

“Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.”
― Jonathan Franzen, How to Be Alone

“[T]hat I could find company and consolation and hope in an object pulled almost at random from a bookshelf--felt akin to an instance of religious grace.”
― Jonathan Franzen, How to Be Alone

“When the sex is persuasively rendered, it tends to read autobiographically, and there are limits to my desire for immersion in a stranger's biochemistry.”
― Jonathan Franzen, How to Be Alone

“Fiction, I believed, was the transmutation of experiential dross into linguistic gold. Fiction meant taking up whatever the world had abandoned by the road and making something beautiful out of it.”
― Jonathan Franzen, How to Be Alone

“If multiculturalism succeeds in making us a nation of independently empowered tribes, each tribe will be deprived of the comfort of victimhood and be forced to confront human limitation for what it is: a fixture of life.”
― Jonathan Franzen, How to Be Alone

“Not just Negroponte, who doesn't like to read, but even Birkerts, who thinks that history is ending, underestimates the instability of society and the unruly diversity of its members. The electronic apotheosis of mass culture has merely reconfirmed the elitism of literary reading, which was briefly obscured in the novel's heyday. I mourn the eclipse of the cultural authority that literature once possessed, and I rue the onset of an age so anxious that the pleasure of a text becomes difficult to sustain. I don't suppose that many other people will give away their TVs. I'm not sure I'll last long myself without buying one. But the first lesson reading teaches is how to be alone.”
― Jonathan Franzen, How to Be Alone