Crossroads Jonathan Franzen Quotes

He wondered if an action, to qualify as authentically good, needed not only to be untainted by self-interest but also to bring no pleasure of any kind.

The dream of a novel was more resilient than other kinds of dreaming. It could be interrupted in mid-sentence and snapped back into later.

He was realizing too late that old people weren't entirely stupid.

Your father doesn’t look to our Savior but to what other men think of him. He preaches love but holds a grudge like no mans business.

I think badness is the fundamental condition of humanity.

There was a kind of liberation in jettisoning all thought of being a good person.

It’s like there are these words, they’re out there in the world, and you start wondering what it would be like to say them. Words have their own power—they create the feeling, just by the fact of your saying them.

Did his soul change every time it achieved a new insight? The very definition of a soul was immutability. Perhaps the root of his confusion was the conflation of soul and knowledge. Perhaps the soul was one of those tools built to do exactly one specific task, to know that I am I, and was mutable with respect to all other forms of knowledge?

According to Scripture, earthly life was but a moment, but the moment seemed spacious when he was with her.

Perhaps the soul was one of those tools built to do exactly one specific task, to know that I am I, and was mutable with respect to all other forms of knowledge?

I don’t deserve joy!' 'No one does. It’s a gift from God.

A noseful of Cottrell ought to have sobered her, but somehow everything was interchangeable.

And so began the remainder of her life.

It occurred to her that the Perry in her head had been nothing but a sentimental projection, extrapolated from the little boy he’d been. She didn’t know the real Perry any more than Russ knew the real her. “How

Yes, but that’s because you’re not poor. When you’re poor, things just happen to you. You feel like you can’t control anything. You’re completely at God’s mercy. That’s why Jesus tells us that the poor are blessed—because having nothing brings you closer to God.” “That woman didn’t strike me as being especially close to God.

It was strange that self-pity wasn't on the list of deadly sins; none was deadlier.

The whole notion of coolness was puerile.

I’m the fat little humiliation he’s married to.

It was awkward to be called dear by a person you felt like calling insufferable bitch.

Marion stepped up to the counter and surveyed the candy-bar display with militant loathing.

three Crossroads sophomores were shoveling snow with a zeal that suggested their work was voluntary.

Clem couldn’t stand to be in the same room with him. He was giving up his student deferment to show his father what a strong man did.

You have some fine qualities, but imagination was never one of them.

Evil had pursued her all her life, and now the world was exploding with the color of it, and nowhere was there refuge.

During the Depression, the record companies went out in the field and made amazing authentic recordings—Lead Belly, Charley Patton, Tommy Johnson. I was working with an afterschool program in Harlem, and I’d come home every night and play those records, and it was like being carried straight into the South in the twenties. There was so much pain in those old voices. It helped me understand the pain I was dealing with in Harlem. Because that’s what the blues are really about. That’s what went missing when the white bands started aping the style. I can’t hear any pain at all in the new music.

It was unfair to have enjoyed her body when she was young and then burdened her with children and a thousand duties, only to now feel miserable whenever he had to venture into public with her and her sorry hair, her unavailing makeup, her seemingly self-spiting choice of dress. He pitied her for the unfairness; he felt guilty. But he couldn’t help blaming her, too, because her unattractiveness advertised unhappiness.

After she died and Becky’s mother pronounced her judgment, Becky understood what a survival mechanism disdain had been for her aunt, who had few other defenses against an uncaring world. For Becky herself, disdain was more of an emergency measure, taken only when someone directly tried to make her feel bad.

In the hush of the emptied campus, he could faintly hear the mightiness of Illinois, the rumble of a freight train, the moan of eighteen-wheelers, coal transported from the south, car parts from the north, fattened livestock and staggering corn yields from the middle, all roads leading to the broad-shouldered city on the lake.

He’d wondered about Kitty’s implication—whether she considered him uniquely good and trustworthy, or uniquely unsexed and unmanly and unthreatening. Either way, the effect had been to make his impending date with Frances feel more thrillingly illicit. In anticipation of it, he’d smuggled out of his house and into the church his final selection of blues records and a grimy old coat, a sheepskin thing from Arizona, that he hoped might lend him a bit of an edge. In Arizona, he’d had an edge, and, fairly or not, he believed that what had dulled it was his marriage.

To me, there’s nothing realer in the world than God, and Satan is no less real. Sin is real and God’s forgiveness is real. That’s the message of the Gospel. But there’s not much in the Gospel about the afterlife—John is the only one who talks about it. And doesn’t that seem strange? If the afterlife is so important? When the rich young man asks Jesus how he might have eternal life, Jesus doesn’t give him a straight answer. He seems to say that heaven is loving God and obeying the commandments, and hell is being lost in sin—forsaking God. Father Fergus says I have to believe that Jesus is talking about a literal heaven and hell, because that’s what the Church teaches. But I’ve read those verses a hundred times. The rich young man asks about eternity, and Jesus tells him to give away his money. He says what to do in the present—as if the present is where you find eternity—and I think that’s right. Eternity is a mystery to us, just like God is a mystery. It doesn’t have to mean rejoicing in heaven or burning in hell. It could be a timeless state of grace or bottomless despair. I think there’s eternity in every second we’re alive.

...he [Perry Hildebrandt] broached the subject of goodness and its relation to intelligence. He'd come to the reception for selfless reasons, but he now saw that he might get not only a free buzz but free advise from, as it were, two professionals. 'I suppose what I'm asking,' he said, 'is whether goodness can ever truly be its own reward, or whether, consciously or not, it always serves some personal instrumentality.' Reverend Walsh [Trinity Lutheran] and the rabbi [Meyer] exchanged glances in which Perry detected pleasant surprise. It gratified him to upset their expectations of a fifteen-year-old. 'Adam may have a different answer,' the rabbi said, but in the Jewish faith there is really only one measure of righteousness: Do you celebrate God and obey His commandments?' 'That would suggest,' Perry said, 'that goodness and God are essentially synonymous.' 'That's the idea,' the rabbi said. 'In biblical times, when God manifested Himself more directly. He could seem like quite the hard-ass--striking people blind for trivial offenses, telling Abraham to kill his son. But the essence of the Jewish faith is that God does what He does, and we obey Him.' 'So, in other words, it doesn't matter what a righteous person's private thoughts are, so long as he obeys the letter of God's commandments?' 'And worships Him, yes. Of course, at the level of folk wisdom, a man can be righteous without being a -mensch.- I'm sure you see this, too, Adam--the pious man who makes everyone around him miserable. That might be what Perry is asking about.' 'My question,' Perry said, 'is whether we can ever escape our selfishness. Even if you bring in God, and make him the measure of goodness, the person who worships and obeys Him still wants something for himself. He enjoys the feeling of being righteous, or he wants eternal life, or what have you. If you're smart enough to think about it, there's always some selfish angle.' The rabbi smiled. 'There may be no way around it, when you put it like that. But we "bring in God," as you say--for the believer, of course, it's God who brought -us- in--to establish a moral order in which your question becomes irrelevant. When obedience is the defining principle, we don't need to police every little private thought we might have.' 'I think there's more to Perry's question, though,' Reverend Walsh said. 'I think he is pointing to sinfulness, which is our fundamental condition. In Christian faith, only one man has ever exemplified perfect goodness, and he was the Son of God. The rest of us can only hope for glimmers of what it's like to be truly good. When we perform an act of charity, or forgive an enemy, we feel the goodness of Christ in our hearts. We all have an innate capability to recognize true goodness, but we're also full of sin, and those two parts of us are constantly at war.' 'Exactly,' Perry said. 'How do I know if I'm really being good or if I'm just pursuing a sinful advantage?' 'The answer, I would say, is by listening to your heart. Only your heart can tell you what your true motive is--whether it partakes of Christ. I think my position is similar to Rabbi Meyer's. The reason we need faith--in our case, faith in the Lord Jesus Christ--is that it gives us a rock-solid basis for evaluating our actions. Only through faith in the perfection of our Savior, only by comparing our actions to his example, only by experiencing his living presence in our hearts, can we hope to be forgiven for the more selfish thoughts we might have. Only faith in Christ redeems us. Without him, we're lost in a sea of second-guessing our motives.

who you are, but I’m not in love with you.

The nakedness of the presents on the floor was a sad premonition of their naked future, after the brief, false glory of being wrapped.

Shouldn't goodness be its own reward? He [Perry Hildebrandt] wondered if an action, to qualify as authentically good, needed not only to be untainted by self-interest but also to bring no pleasure of any kind.

... 'I understand what you're saying,' he [Perry] said to Reverend Walsh. 'But what if a person isn't able to have faith?' 'Not everyone finds faith overnight. Faith is rarely easy. But if you've ever done a good thing, and felt a glow in your heart, then that's a little message from God. He's telling you that Christ is in you, and that you have the freedom and capacity to pursue a closer relationship with him. Seek, and ye shall find.' 'It's approximately the same if you're a Jew,' the rabbi said, 'although we tend to emphasize that you're a Jew whether you feel like it or not. It's more a matter of God tracking you down than of you finding God.' 'I don't think our positions are so dissimilar in that respect,' Reverend Walsh said stiffly. ... 'But so,' he [Perry Hildebrandt] said, 'what if I feel the kind of glow you're talking about, but it doesn't lead me to God? What if it's just one of those feelings that any sentient animal might have? If I never find God, or He never finds me, it sound's like you're saying, basically, that I'm damned.' 'In principle, I suppose that is the doctrine,' Reverend Walsh said. 'But you're young, and life is long. There's a near infinity of moments when you might receive God's grace. All it takes is one moment.' 'In the meantime,' the rabbi said, 'I think it's enough to be a mensch.

[Russ Hildebrandt] 'I don't deserve joy!' [Marion Hildebrandt] 'No one does. It's a gift from God.

Clem didn’t know a man who worked more passionately for social justice than his father, and when you really loved someone, the whole person, you simply accepted the little things you might have wished were different. He could see eyes being rolled when his father waxed religious at a fellowship meeting, but Becky herself rolled her eyes like that. It didn’t mean she didn’t love him.

All morning, on and off the floor, her mind was so scrambled with self-consciousness that when she opened her mouth her mind lagged behind and then dashed forward, propelled by the anxiety that what she was saying was unintelligible. Each time, she found that she’d spoken halfway appropriately, and each time this seemed like amazing luck.

ticklers bearing down on Kim Perkins, David Goya pissed off at them.

She'd barely registered as a person at all. She'd been little more than an inconvenient object at the breakfast table, an annoying vase in the way of his sugar bowl, not even worth telling a decent lie to. Soon enough, when she'd lost her fat, she would have more ways to make him pay. For now, the sweetest punishment would be to say nothing, let him think she knew nothing, let him damn himself by telling further lies.

That would be interesting. It's interesting to imagine you as a person more or less like me, trying to be good, trying to serve God, but constantly doubting yourself. Rationally, I ought to be able to build on that and find a way to forgive you. But as soon as I put your face to the person I'm imagining, I'm sick with hatred. All I can see is you having it both ways. Getting off on your power and feeling good about the fact that it worries you. Being an asshole and congratulating yourself on your 'honesty' about it. And maybe everyone does that. Maybe everyone finds a way to feel good about their fundamental sinfulness, but it doesn't make me hate you any less. It's the other way around. I hate you so much that I start hating all of humanity, including myself. The idea that you and] are in any way alike--it's disgusting.

He thought of calling her again, if only to resupply himself with shame, but the purity of the hurt of losing her was of a piece with the season’s dark afternoons and long nights.

What would it be like to live with a person capable of joy?

he only ran that house as a way to

Every man seeking salvation had a signature weakness to remind him of his nullity before the Lord and complicate communion with Him.

How like a mental illness a nation’s economy was!

He’d come to Los Angeles to break into the movies as a writer. His soul was still alive then, but he’d met a girl who had dreams of her own, and one thing led to another, and now he was just another member of the goddamned middle class, suckering people for living.

To dream of happiness, wake up, and walk on air Is to know the chance of happiness awake is there.

You wouldn’t believe how quickly the most interesting person in the world can turn into the most boring person you’ll ever meet.

She seemed more pitiable than murderable.

Along the deserted road to the gas station were mercury-vapor lights that seemed weaker than those in New Prospect, as if Navajo impoverishment extended even to amperage.

I suppose what I’m asking,” he said, “is whether goodness can ever truly be its own reward, or whether, consciously or not, it always serves some personal instrumentality

tells him to give away his money. He says what to do in the present—as if the present is where you find eternity—and I think that’s right. Eternity is a mystery to us, just like God is a mystery. It doesn’t have to mean rejoicing in heaven or burning in hell. It could be a timeless state of grace or bottomless despair. I think there’s eternity in every second we’re alive.

Science and delusion had no ground in common.

But she, in a sense, had betrayed him first. If she hadn’t been so supportive of his failings, he might have made peace long ago.

When he happened to look at Marion directly, it was often to ask, “Where’s your sister?

that people were cruel to what they were afraid of loving.

entered a kind of trance of not-herselfness.

While man experienced time as a progression, from unknown past to unknowable future, to God the entire course of history was eternally present

She was one of New Prospect’s original hippies, a walking yes to the question Are You Experienced?

moral fraud.

Ora si rendeva conto […] che aveva sempre odiato essere la figlia di un pastore. I padri delle sue amiche progettavano edifici, curavano malattie, perseguivano criminali. Suo padre era come un fabbricante di croci, però peggio. La sua fede ardente, la sua santità, erano un odore che aveva sempre minacciato di aderire a lei, come la puzza delle Chesterfield, però peggio, perché non si poteva lavare via.

I don’t even know how it happened, Russ said. How I came to hate you so much. It goes way beyond pride - it’s basically consumed my life, and I don’t understand it. How I can be a servant of God and feel this way. … I am sick with hatred. All I can see is you having it both ways. Getting off on your power and feeling good about the fact that it worries you. Being an asshole and congratulating yourself on your honesty about it. … I hate you so much that I start hating all of humanity, including myself. The idea that you and I are in any way alike - it’s disgusting.

But what you are saying now, the way you’re speaking to me - there’s a level to this that I never saw when you were in the group. A level of honesty, vulnerability. If you could have opened yourself up like this even once… It’s kind of amazing to see it now.

Ordinarily he loved the glow of commerce on a dark winter afternoon. Almost every store contained things he wanted, and in this season every lamppost was wound with pine boughs and topped with a red bow that spoke additionally of buying, of receiving, of things brand-new and useful to him. But now, although he didn’t quite have the feeling itself yet, he remembered how it would feel to be unmoved by the stores, unwanting of anything in them, and how much dimmer the lights of commerce would seem to him then, how dead the pine boughs on the lampposts.

The idea was that God was to be found in relationships, not in liturgy and ritual, and that the way to worship Him and approach Him was to emulate Christ in his relationships with his disciples, by exercising honesty, confrontation, and unconditional love.

theoretically sorry

It’s approximately the same if you’re a Jew,” the rabbi said, “although we tend to emphasize that you’re a Jew whether you like it or not. It’s more a matter of God tracking you down than of you finding God.

he remembered how it would feel to be unmoved by the stores, unwanting of anything in them, and how much dimmer the lights

Things that were forbidden were often precisely what the heart most wanted. Things became more attractive because they were forbidden by some cruel or uncomprehending authority.

Overindulgence had shattered his lambent rationality into myriad splinters, each consisting of an insight unrelated to any other, each brightly reflecting a star-hot whiteness now blazing in his stomach; he thought he might vomit.

It made him very anxious. The feeling was like something from a dream, a dreamer’s panicked sense of needing to be somewhere else, of being late for an important exam, of having forgotten he had a train to catch. How absurd that he’d thought he needed to prove himself stronger than his father. He’d been fighting a battle long since won, in an irrelevant sector of the dreamworld.

How many times had he read the word joy without having experienced what it meant?

It was love that worked miracles; no force on earth was more powerful.

Once he was in love with her, it became axiomatic that every conviction of hers deserved strong consideration for adoption.

But there's not much in the gospel about the afterlife--John is the only one who talks about it. And doesn't that seem strange? If the afterlife is so important? When the rich young man asks Jesus how he may have an eternal life, Jesus doesn't give him a straight answer. He seems to say that heaven is loving God and obeying the commandments, and hell is being lost in sin--forsaking God. Father Fergus says I have to believe that Jesus is talking about a literal heaven and hell, because that's what the Church teaches. But I've read those verses a hundred times. The rich young man asks about eternity, and Jesus tells him to give away his money. He says what to do in the present--as if the present is where you find eternity--and I think that's right. Eternity is a mystery to us, just like God is a mystery. It doesn't have to mean rejoicing in heaven or burning in hell. It could be a timeless state of grace or bottomless despair. I think there's eternity in every second we're alive.

No wonder, I thought, her little routines meant so much to her. She gave me so many insights into my own life but, too, an insight into the lives of people who wake up alone every morning and find the courage to get out of bed and show their face.

He heard himself issue a chuckle, prefatory to some kind of speech act. The chuckle was reekingly phony, a creaking contraption of sinew and muscle, involuntarily activated by a craven wish to please and to fit in—to pass as an authentic person. It seemed to him that every word he’d ever uttered had been loathsome, slimy with self-interested calculation, his fatuousness audible to everyone and universally deplored.

He’d inspired Perry to devise a theory of how all religion worked: Along comes a leader who’s uninhibited enough to use everyday words in a new and strong and counterintuitive way, which emboldens the people around him to use this rhetoric themselves, and the very act of using it creates sensations unlike anything they’re used to in everyday life;

Watching him fall down and pick himself back up, Perry mourned no longer being small enough that falling didn’t hurt. He no longer even remembered how it felt to have the ground so unthreateningly proximate. Why had he been in such a hurry to grow up? It was as if he’d never experienced the grace of childhood.

She could clearly perceive the contours of her obsession with him. It would have been sensible to tear it from her skull, but the object had grown too large to be removed without splitting her head open. Despite its sick enormity, it was also too beautiful to her.

I think there’s eternity in every second we’re alive.

simply by trying to speak honestly, surrendering to emotion, supporting other people in their honesty and emotion, she experienced her first glimmerings of spirituality.

Marion had long been inspired, intellectually, by Russ’s conviction that a gospel of love and community was truer to Christ’s teachings than a gospel of guilt and damnation. But lately she’d begun to wonder.

For a Catholic, guilt was more than just a feeling. It was the inescapable consequence of sin. It was an objective thing, plainly visible to God.

The difference between dishonesty and make-believe, Shirley said, was artistic imagination. Though it was obvious that Becky didn’t have this kind of imagination—in New York, she preferred the mummies at the Met to the European painters, the dinosaurs across the park to the mummies, and Macy’s to the dinosaurs—Shirley told her that this was just as well, because the world of art and theater was entirely controlled by cruel men, many of them literally, pardon her French, cocksuckers, and it was better for a woman to be the patron, the appreciator, than patronized and unappreciated. By which, though Shirley never quite spelled it out, Becky understood that she would be better off rich than talented.

was

...he felt unbearably sorry for himself. It was strange that self-pity wasn't on the list of deadly sins; none was deadlier.