The End of the End of the Earth Quotes

“Kierkegaard, in 'Either/Or,' makes fun of the 'busy man' for whom busyness is a way of avoiding an honest self-reckoning. You might wake up in the middle of the night and realize that you're lonely in your marriage, or that you need to think about what your level of consumption is doing to the planet, but the next day you have a million little things to do, and the day after that you have another million things. As long as there's no end of little things, you never have to stop and confront the bigger questions. Writing or reading an essay isn't the only way to stop and ask yourself who you really are and what your life might mean, but it is one good way. And if you consider how laughably unbusy Kierkegaard's Copenhagen was, compared with our own age, those subjective tweets and hasty blog posts don't seem so essayistic. They seem more like means of avoiding what a real essay might force on us. We spend our days reading, on screens, stuff we'd never bother reading in a printed book, and bitch about how busy we are.”
― Jonathan Franzen, The End of the End of the Earth: Essays

“Attempting to write an honest essay doesn't alter the multiplicity of my selves. What changes, if I take the time to stop and measure, is that my multi-selved identity acquires substance.”
― Jonathan Franzen, The End of the End of the Earth: Essays

“The thing about games is that you don't want to look too closely at why you're playing them. A great yawning emptiness underlies them, a close relative of the nothingness that lies beneath the surface of our busy lives.”
― Jonathan Franzen, The End of the End of the Earth: Essays

“Trump and his alt-right supporters take pleasure in pushing the buttons of the politically correct, but it only works because the buttons are there to be pushed—students and activists claiming the right to not hear things that upset them, and to shout down ideas that offend them. Intolerance particularly flourishes online, where measured speech is punished by not getting clicked on, invisible Facebook and Google algorithms steer you toward content you agree with, and nonconforming voices stay silent for fear of being flamed or trolled or unfriended. The result is a silo in which, whatever side you’re on, you feel absolutely right to hate what you hate. And here is another way in which the essay differs from superficially similar kinds of subjective speech. The essay’s roots are in literature, and literature at its best—the work of Alice Munro, for example—invites you to ask whether you might be somewhat wrong, maybe even entirely wrong, and to imagine why someone else might hate you.”
― Jonathan Franzen, The End of the End of the Earth: Essays

“The stories we tell about the past and imagine for the future are mental constructions that birds can do without. Birds live squarely in the present. And at present, although our cats and our windows and our pesticides kill billions of them every year, and although some species, particularly on oceanic islands, have been lost forever, their world is still very much alive. In every corner of the globe, in nests as small as walnuts or as large as haystacks, chicks are pecking through their shells and into the light.”
― Jonathan Franzen, The End of the End of the Earth: Essays

“One reason that birds matter - ought to matter - is that they are our last, best connection to a natural world that is otherwise receding. They're the most vivid and widespread representatives of the Earth as it was before people arrived on it.”
― Jonathan Franzen, The End of the End of the Earth: Essays

“The radical otherness of birds is integral to their beauty and their value. They are always among us but never of us. They’re the other world-dominating animals that evolution has produced, and their indifference to us ought to serve as a chastening reminder that we’re not the measure of all things.”
― Jonathan Franzen, The End of the End of the Earth: Essays

“Ten Rules for the Novelist:

1. The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.
  2. Fiction that isn’t an author’s personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn’t worth writing for anything but money.
  3. Never use the word then as a conjunction—we have and for this purpose. Substituting then is the lazy or tone-deaf writer’s non-solution to the problem of too many ands on the page.
  4. Write in third person unless a really distinctive first-person voice offers itself irresistibly.
  5. When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.
  6. The most purely autobiographical fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more autobiographical story than The Metamorphosis.
  7. You see more sitting still than chasing after.
  8. It’s doubtful that anyone with an Internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
  9. Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.
10. You have to love before you can be relentless.”
― Jonathan Franzen, The End of the End of the Earth: Essays

“one benefit of being a depressive pessimist, which is the propensity to laugh in dark times.”
― Jonathan Franzen, The End of the End of the Earth: Essays

“As long as mitigating climate change trumps all other environmental concerns, no landscape on Earth is safe.”
― Jonathan Franzen, The End of the End of the Earth: Essays

“With public opinion," he said, "there's weather, and then there's climate. You're trying to change the climate, and that takes time.”
― Jonathan Franzen, The End of the End of the Earth: Essays

“Some of the most influential novels of recent years, by Rachel Cusk and Karl Ove Knausgaard, take the method of self-conscious first-person testimony to a new level. Their more extreme admirers will tell you that imagination and invention are outmoded contrivances; that to inhabit the subjectivity of a character unlike the author is an act of appropriation, even colonialism; that the only authentic and politically defensible mode of narrative is autobiography.”
― Jonathan Franzen, The End of the End of the Earth

“Does the world really need more amateur photographs of giraffes?”
― Jonathan Franzen, The End of the End of the Earth: Essays

“Invisible Facebook and Google algorithms steer you toward content you agree with, and nonconforming voices stay silent for fear of being flamed or trolled or unfriended. The result is a silo in which, whatever side you're on, you feel absolutely right to hate what you hate.”
― Jonathan Franzen, The End of the End of the Earth: Essays