Jonathan Franzen Quotes

There is a time in our life when we need to strut our stuff and groove on grandiosity, when we need to be viewed as remarkable and rare, when we need to exhibit ourself in front of a mirror that reflects our self-admiration, when we need a parent to function as that mirror.

People are always calling me a mirror and if a mirror looks into a mirror, what is there to see?

People create stories create people; or rather stories create people create stories.

One does not meet oneself until one catches the reflection from an eye other than human.

The selfie, like all technology, causes us to reflect on our human values. This is a good thing because it challenges us to figure out what they really are.

Social media makes you think.

Laila remembered Mammy telling Babi once that she had married a man who had no convictions. Mammy didn't understand. She didn't understand that if she looked into a mirror, she would find the one unfailing conviction of his life looking right back at her.

They can romanticize us so, mirrors, and that is their secret: what a subtle torture it would be to destroy all the mirrors in the world: where then could we look for reassurerance of our identities? I tell you, my dear, Narcissus was so egotist...he was merely another of us who, in our unshatterable isolation, recognized, on seeing his reflection, the beautiful comrade, the only inseparatable love...poor Narcissus, possibly the only human who was ever honest on this point.

I feel that silence is the greatest word, ever. When you don't talk, people begin to read things into you or you become what they long for. When you don't talk, you almost become the mirror image of the other person.

I can see her clearly, standing on the rock beside Peg Gratton, unflinching before Eaton and the rest of the race committee. I can't remember when I've been that brave, and it shames me. The truth is, I feel myself being fascinated and repelled by her; She's both a mirror of myself and a door to part of the island that i'm not. It's like when the mare goddess looked into my eye; I felt that there was a part of myself that I didn't know.

This autobiography of mine is a mirror, and I am looking at myself in it all the time. Incidentally I notice the people that pass along at my back - I get glimpses of them in the mirror - and whenever they say or do anything that can help advertise me and flatter me and raise me in my own estimation, I set these things down in my autobiography.

I really believe in a oneness. So if I'm looking at somebody else, it's not in a narcissistic way, but you're kind of seeing yourself.

Man shouldn’t be able to see his own face – there’s nothing more sinister. Nature gave him the gift of not being able to see it, and of not being able to stare into his own eyes. Only in the water of rivers and ponds could he look at his face. And the very posture he had to assume was symbolic. He had to bend over, stoop down, to commit the ignominy of beholding himself. The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.

People ask me why I don't tweet. Honestly, I'm so sick of myself.

All biographers, no matter how sympathetic, end up using their subjects as mirrors to figure themselves out. I don't want to be anyone's mirror.

Relationship is the mirror in which you discover yourself - to be is to be related.

For many of these people the social is just a mirror of themselves. I'm not against the social, but I want something genuinely social, not something that has been fetishized as social so that a group of people can feel better about themselves.

People who live in society have learnt how to see themselves, in mirrors, as they appear to their friends. I have no friends: is that why my flesh is so naked?

They were each like a mirror for the other, reflecting the changes in themselves.

People had a habit of looking at me as if I were some kind of mirror instead of a person.

People want nothing but mirrors around them. To reflect them while they’re reflecting too ... Reflections of reflections and echoes of echoes. No beginning and no end. No center and no purpose.

We are the mirror - As well as the face in it.

For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me.

Those social networks, there's something sad about them. Is it because they don't have enough knowledge about friends and people? I don't understand it. It's like a talkative mirror where people talk to themselves. And what I hate most in life is selfies.

The people around you are you. They share your history. They can even write it with you. And when you lose one, there's no doubt you lose some of yourself, however they're lost.