Purity

by Jonathan Franzen

This brought her out of the unreality of what was happening;

Even to cry would have been a reminder, and so she didn’t cry.

You were their favorite everything!

But it was one thing to identify the source of his depression, quite another to do anything about it.

Love turned out to be soul-crippling, stomach-turning, weirdly claustrophobic: a sense of endlessness bottled up inside him, endless weight, endless potential, with only the small outlet of a shivering pale girl in a bad rain jacket to escape through.

Love made this feel like the most remarkably true statement he’d ever made.

His powerlessness itself was sweet.

He closed his eyes so that he didn’t have to see her leave.

It all came back, especially the love. But the fact that it was coming back made him angry.

That she could say such a thing, and say it so coolly, was an unexpectedly painful blow to him.

The agony of withdrawal from her was a measure of the depth of his addiction.

She was still diabolically lovely.

It was terrible how much he loved her.

It occurred to her that what she was feeling wasn’t generic loneliness.

“The soul,” he said to Pip, “is a chemical sensation.

Reporting was imitation life, imitation expertise, imitation worldliness, imitation intimacy; mastering a subject only to forget it, befriending people only to drop them. And yet, like so many imitative pleasures, it was highly addictive.

There’s that great passage in Proust where Marcel talks about imagining the face of the girl you’ve only glimpsed from behind. How beautiful the unseen face always is. I have yet to experience the disappointing reality of César.”

“Have you ever been tempted to leave a thought unspoken?” “I’m a writer, baby. Voicing thought is what I’m poorly paid and uncharitably reviewed for.”

She felt as if she’d walked into someone else’s life, someone else’s house. She didn’t recognize it.

I’m almost always happy with you. You make me happy every time you walk into the room.”

Each of the two languages, the verbal and the nonverbal, kept distracting her from the other, and she was in any case increasingly drunk, and so it was hard to follow what was being said in either language.

“There’s the imperative to keep secrets, and the imperative to have them known. How do you know that you’re a person, distinct from other people? By keeping certain things to yourself. You guard them inside you, because, if you don’t, there’s no distinction between inside and outside. Secrets are the way you know you even have an inside.

“I want you to like me. I want you never to leave me. I want to get old with you.”

there was simply something broken about us, broken beyond repair and beyond assignment of blame.

there was something empty in her eyes, a deadness, the despair of the disparity between what she looked like and what she felt herself to be.)

she kept alienating people with her moral absolutism and her sense of superiority, which is so often the secret heart of shyness.

“I’ve gotten good at being alone.

I can hear myself think better when it’s quiet. It wasn’t easy to become a person who’s OK being alone on a Saturday night, but I did the work, I got there,

“I want us to be different. I want us to be like nothing else.”

“That I’m going to work better without you, and you’re going to be happier without me. And that’ll be the end of us.

You have a right to be happy for yourself.

Only love, only long empathy and identification and compassion, can root another person in your heart so deeply that there’s no escaping your hatred of her, not ever; especially not when the thing you hate most about her is her capacity to be hurt by you. The love persists and the hatred with it. Even hating your own heart is no relief.

I’d thought that nothing could be worse than the sight of her being hurt and shamed by me. But in fact I hated her even more for hating me.

The aim of the Internet and its associated technologies was to “liberate” humanity from the tasks—making things, learning things, remembering things—that had previously given meaning to life and thus had constituted life.

real love couldn’t be willed.

now seemed able to know only the emptiness and pointlessness of being.

Everything was effect now, nothing cause.

It was a temporary sadness, the more beautiful for being sad, the more precious for being temporary.

“It was like a perfect storm of wrongness, that night.”