Jonathan Franzen

"In the years when he'd worked full-time, he'd never complained about frozen or takeout or preprepared dinners. To Caroline it probably seemed that he was changing the rules on her. But to Gary it seem…"

"Life, in her experience, had a kind of velvet luster. You looked at yourself from one perspective and all you saw was weirdness. Move your head a little bit, though, and everything looked reasonably n…"

"Today's Baudelaires are hip-hop artists."

"Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular."

"The taste of self-inflicted suffering, of an evening trashed in spite, brought curious satisfactions. Other people stopped being real enough to carry blame for how you felt. Only you and your refusal …"

"One of the consolations of dying... Seriously, the world is changing so quickly that if you had any more than 80 years of change I don't see how you could stand it psychologically."

"Someone worked really hard to make the language just right, just the way they wanted it. They were so sure of it that they printed it in ink, on paper. A screen always feels like we could delete that,…"

"An ink bottle, which now seems impossibly quaint, was still thinkable as a symbol in 1970."