Jonathan Franzen Quotes

It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life.

Oh Agnes, Oh my soul, so may thy face be by me when I close my life indeed; so may I, when realities are melting from me, like the shadows which I now dismiss, still find thee near me, pointing upward!

Hope is the consolation of the world.

Science gave me a cosmic religious feeling, and I would get the same feeling when I was dragged to the Met and the Museum of Modern Art.

I really love storytelling, and I love the stories as they reveal themselves. It's an incredibly nourishing process; it's probably the closest I come to having a religion.

I didn't have a fireworks moment for my salvation. I had a falling in love with Jesus in Sunday school when I was a very young child.

I hope to bring people to God with my songs.

I have a sort of Catholic-slash-Calvinist view of human nature, but every day I meet somebody who is doing cool things. So people get you out of your solitude and do things that exceed your expectations every day.

Wherever I go with my life, even the good times and the bad parts, only two people are with me: God and my music.

Religions are tough. Either they make no contentions which are subject to disproof or they quickly redesign doctrine after disproof. ... near the core of the religious experience is something remarkably resistant to rational inquiry.

Fathers, I do not practice. I'm not religious in life, but when I perform "The Creation of the World" and when my soul is touched by the confrontation of "Good and Evil," then God enters in me.

a good book can make an almost impossible existence, liveable ( from 'the luck of the word' )

I for sure believe in miracles. For me, a miracle is seeing the world with light in your eyes. It's knowing there's always hope and possibility where none seems to exist. Many people are so closed to miracles that even when one is boldly staring them in the face, they label it coincidence or serendipity. I call it like I see it.

Tens of thousands, perhaps millions, have come into some kind of religious experience by accepting Christ, and they have not been saved.

Reading gave me hope.

Hope is at once both simple and profound. It is hope that binds Heaven and earth. Hope is the bridge between Heaven and earth.

Come, my best Friends! my Books! and lead me on.

Men who believe that, through some exceptional grace or good fortune, they have found God, feel little need of culture.

Books—they weren't ladders out of the abyss, but they were companions.

... religious experience, as we have studied it, cannot be cited as unequivocally supporting the infinitist belief. The only thingthat it unequivocally testifies to is that we can experience union with something larger than ourselves and in that union find our greatest peace.

If you ever feel distressed during your day - call upon our Lady - just say this simple prayer: 'Mary, Mother of Jesus, please be a mother to me now.' I must admit - this prayer has never failed me.

Whatever deceptions life may have in store for you, music itself is not going to let you down.

There is no need to be dismayed if love sometimes follows torturous ways. Grace has the power to make straight the paths of human love.

Of course, mysticism is very hard to isolate because, given the kind of consciousness that I was sort of instructed in as religious consciousness; that borders on mysticism so closely that it's hard to know whether you qualify or not, or whether mysticism is artificially isolated when it is treated as a separate thing from experience. Obviously, mysticism can be a form of madness, but then consciousness can be a form of madness.

Love, like the opening of the heavens to the Saints, shows for a moment, even to the dullest man, the possibilities of the human race. He has faith, hope, and charity for another being, perhaps but a creation of his imagination: still it is a great advance for a man to be profoundly loving even in his imaginations.