Jonathan Franzen Quotes

Because my dad was often gone, I never wanted to do anything that would make him stay away even longer. I became extra careful about what I said and how I said it, afraid he'd think I was angry or didn't love him. And the truth is, I was angry. I missed him and wanted him there.

Shadow had heard too many people telling each other not to repress their feelings, to let their emotions out, let the pain go. Shadow thought there was a lot to be said for bottling up emotions. If you did it long enough and deep enough, he suspected, pretty soon you wouldn't feel anything at all.

When you lock everything down tight so that the pain can't get out, you also keep good stuff from getting in.

Just remember when you think you're free, the crack in your heart is me.

I have packed myself into silence so deeply and for so long that I can never unpack myself using words. When I speak, I only pack myself a little differently.

Why is it that people who cannot show feeling presume that that is a strength and not a weakness?

Afraid of decision, I buried my finer feelings in the depths of my heart and they died there.

My whole life has been merely a succession of miserable and unsuccessful denials of feelings or reason.

You don't believe it because you don't understand," he said hoarsely. "Prosper was different. He wasn't like other people. He might have hated me, but he loved me too. In his own way. He couldn't help it; not after raising me for all those years." When no one responded – when he saw nothing but expressions of disbelief on the faces around him – Cadel wailed, "He did! He did! I know he did! He only wanted to wreck my life because he wasn't a part of it!" And as sympathetic hands reached out towards him from every corner of the car, Cadel began to cry like someone whose heart was breaking.

Because if I let myself feel the pain and the anger, I think it might kill me. Or I might kill someone else. I know it's wrong to feel that way about God and I know its's wrong to not feel anything. I hate it. I don't hate God. I hate not loving Him.

I was an emotional manipulator of fighters . . . You have to know how to be cold, you know? Just have no -emotions, no feelings. It takes time, though, to develop that. I'd been working on that since I was 12 years old. It doesn't happen overnight.

Worry, fear, self-distrust bows the heart and turns the spirit back to dust.

My tears are buried in my heart, like cave-locked fountains sleeping.

there's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but I'm too clever, I only let him out at night sometimes when everybody's asleep. I say, I know that you're there, so don't be sad. then I put him back, but he's singing a little in there, I haven't quite let him die and we sleep together like that with our secret pact and it's nice enough to make a man weep, but I don't weep, do you?

"We were the pair. One too afraid to feel anything lest she lose control of her ironclad hold on her emotions, and the other so hungry to feel anything that she´d risk her free will for one night of fun.".

I think it's strange to live in a house with someone you cannot talk to-especially when that someone is your father-and the thought makes me a little sad.

Keeping love buried was a lot like jeeping anger pent up, I'd learned. It just ate you up insides until you wanted to scream or kick something.

There's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but I'm too tough for him, I say, stay in there, I'm not going to let anybody see you.

Heart Breaking, I think that if Dad, staring down the sight of a 10mm, would only tell me he loves me, I could easily change my mind... ...but he won't.

If you allowed yourself to hear or feel amusement, you would hear and feel pain.

I was not allowed to think of him. That was something I tried to be very strict about. Of course I slipped; I was only human. But I was getting better, and so the pain was something I could avoid for days at a time now. The trade-off was the never-ending numbness. Between pain and nothing, I'd chosen nothing.

i have come to terms with my life, and that is my affair - i am not cold, i swear, but i have decided certain things, it is best for me to ignore emotion; i have not been happy dealing with it.

I try to tighten my heart into a knot, a snarl, I try to learn to live dead, just numb, but then I see someone I want, and it's like a nail, like a hot spike right through my chest, and I know I'm losing.

He had discovered that the choice between self-love or love of something other than self offers no escape from suffering either way, it is merely a choice between two woundings, of the pride or of the heart.