Purity Quotes

“Stupidity mistook itself for intelligence, whereas intelligence knew its own stupidity.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Purity

“Everyone thinks they have strict limits,” she said, “until they cross them.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Purity

“The world was overpopulated with talkers and underpopulated by listeners,”
― Jonathan Franzen, Purity

“Don't talk to me about hatred if you haven't been married.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Purity

“it seemed as if the Internet was governed more by fear: the fear of unpopularity and uncoolness, the fear of missing out, the fear of being flamed or forgotten.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Purity

“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.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Purity

“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. A radical exhibitionist is a person who has forfeited his identity. But identity in a vacuum is also meaningless. Sooner or later, the inside of you needs a witness. Otherwise you're just a cow, a cat, a stone, a thing in the world, trapped in your thingness. To have an identity, you have to believe that other identities equally exist. You need closeness with other people. And how is closeness built? By sharing secrets. . . . Your identity exists at the intersection of these lines of trust.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Purity

“And maybe this was what craziness was: an emergency valve to relieve the pressure of unbearable anxiety.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Purity

“It’s like having one red sock in a load of white laundry. One red sock, and nothing is ever white again.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Purity

“Fog spilled from the heights of San Francisco like the liquid it almost was. On better days it spread across the bay and took over Oakland street by street, a thing you saw coming, a change you watched happening to you, a season on the move. Where it encountered redwoods, the most local of rains fell. Where it found open space, its weightless pale passage seemed both endless and like the end of all things. It was a temporary sadness, the more beautiful for being sad, the more precious for being temporary. It was the slow song in minor that the rock-and-roll sun then chased away.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Purity

“Whatever else happened, she wanted a dog in her life.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Purity

“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. Now it seemed as if the only task that meant anything was search-engine optimization.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Purity

“I’m starting to think paradise isn’t eternal contentment. It’s more like there’s something eternal about feeling contented. There’s no such thing as eternal life, because you’re never going to outrun time, but you can still escape time if you’re contented, because then time doesn’t matter.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Purity

“[H]er mind was like a balloon with static cling, attracting random ideas as they floated by[.]”
― Jonathan Franzen, Purity

“Power, power, power: how could the world be organized around the struggle for a thing so lonely and oppressive in the having of it?”
― Jonathan Franzen, Purity

“Our joint plan was to be poor and obscure and pure and take the world by surprise at a later date.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Purity

“To paraphrase Frank Zappa, she’d thought it was a man she wanted, but instead it was a muffin.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Purity

“Don’t talk to me about hatred if you haven’t been married. 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.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Purity

“He felt like a helium balloon straining skyward on a slender string.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Purity

“Tom'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, Purity

“What happened in the virtual world, where beauty existed for the purpose of being hated and besmirched, was more compelling than what happened in the real world, where beauty seemed to have no purpose at all.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Purity

“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. A radical exhibitionist is a person who has forfeited his identity. But identity in a vacuum is also meaningless. Sooner or later, the inside of you needs a witness. Otherwise you're just a cow, a cat, a stone, a thing in the world, trapped in your thingness. To have an identity, you have to believe that other identities equally exist. You need closeness with other people. And how is closeness built? By sharing secrets. Colleen knows what you secretly think of Willow. You know what Colleen secretly thinks of Flor. Your identity exists at the intersection of these lines of trust.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Purity

“He was a sleaze, a nobody, a former graduate student of English studies.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Purity

“The mark of a legitimate revolution - the scientific, for example - was that it didn't brag about its revolutionariness but simply occurred.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Purity

“[P]art of having a complicated mind was understanding its limits, understanding that it couldn't think of everything. Stupidity mistook itself for intelligence, whereas intelligence knew its own stupidity.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Purity

“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. Touching her was the farthest thing from his mind. The impulse was to throw himself at her feet.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Purity

“I’m telling you that I will be all right without you. Everything we have is temporary, the joy, the suffering, everything. I had the joy of experiencing your goodness for a very long time. It was enough. I have no right to ask for more.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Purity

“You can think of me thinking of you, because that’s what I’ll be doing whenever you think of me.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Purity

“So many Jonathans. A plague of literary Jonathans. If you read only the New York Times Book Review, you’d think it was the most common male name in America. Synonymous with talent, greatness. Ambition, vitality.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Purity

“that the more he rebelled against his parents and the more he made his life a reproach to theirs, the more deeply he rooted himself in the same childish relation to them.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Purity