Quotes

The Corrections by Johnathan Franzen

read November 2024, posted 12 December 2024:

“He couldn’t figure out if she was immensely well adjusted or seriously messed up.”

“What you discovered about yourself in raising children wasn’t always agreeable or attractive.”

“She was so much a personality and so little anything else that even staring straight at her he had no idea what she really looked like.”

“And if you sat at the dinner table long enough, whether in punishment or in refusal or simply in boredom, you never stopped sitting there. Some part of you sat there all your life.”

A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz

read sometime in 2022, posted 18 December 2024:

“I told him I was concerned about him eating all his meals alone, because the clinking of cutlery on a plate echoing through an empty house is one of the top five depressing noises of all time.”

“…I wondered if it was blasphemous to tell God that rainbows are kitsch.”

“I’ll pay you back,” Dad said, after an uncomfortable silence. “Double. I’ll pay you back double.”
“Martin, don’t worry about it.”
“Eddie. You know what Nietzsche said about gratitude.”
“No, Marty, I don’t.”
“He said a man in debt wants his benefactor dead.”
“OK. Pay me back.”

Big Red Son by David Foster Wallace

read sometime in 2021, posted 1 January 2025:

“At root, vulgar just means popular on a mass scale. It is the semantic opposite of pretentious or snobby. It is humility with a comb-over. It is Nielsen ratings and Barnum’s axiom and the real bottom line. It is big, big business.”¹

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

read January 2025, posted 17 January 2025:

“It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.”

“I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.”

---