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Book: Purity
Quotes of Book: Purity

Jonathan Franzen _ Purity
And yet: guilt must be the most monstrous of human quantities, because what I did to relieve my guilt then-stay in the marriage-was precisely the thing I felt guiltiest about later, when the marriage was over.
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Jonathan Franzen _ Purity
There's the imperative to keep secrets, and the imperative to have them known. How do you know that you're a person, distinct from other people? By keeping certain things to yourself. You guard them inside you, because, if you don't, there's no distinction between inside and outside. Secrets are the way you know you even have an inside. A radical exhibitionist is a person who has forfeited his identity. But identity in a vacuum is also meaningless. Sooner or later, the inside of you needs a witness. Otherwise you're just a cow, a cat, a stone, a thing in the world, trapped in your thingness. To have an identity, you have to believe that other identities equally exist. You need closeness with other people. And how is closeness built? By sharing secrets. Colleen knows what you secretly think of Willow. You know what Colleen secretly thinks of Flor. Your identity exists at the intersection of these lines of trust.
book-quote secrets identity intimacy
Jonathan Franzen _ Purity
Don't you love me, Mother?" Cornered by the question, she agreed to try to help him. Before she left the church, it seemed necessary to both of them that they embrace, and what an odd embrace it was, what a sick transaction. She, who wasn't capable of real love, pretended to love him while he, who really did love her, exploited her pretended love.
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Jonathan Franzen _ Purity
Don't talk to me about hatred if you haven't been married. Only love, only long empathy and identification and compassion, can root another person in your heart so deeply that there's no escaping your hatred of her, not ever; especially not when the thing you hate most about her is her capacity to be hurt by you. The love persists and the hatred with it. Even hating your own heart is no relief. I don't think I'd ever hated her more than I did for exposing herself to the shame of my refusing to speak in Leonard's voice."
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Jonathan Franzen _ Purity
The note of self-righteousness in his voice set fire to a larger and more diffuse pool of the gas, a combustible political substance that had seeped into her from her mother and then from certain college professors and certain gross-out movies and now also from Annagret, a sense of the unfairness of what one professor had called the anisotropy of gendered relationships, wherein boys could camouflage their objectifying desires with the language of feelings while girls played the boys' game of sex at their own risk, dupes if they objectified and victims if they didn't.
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Jonathan Franzen _ Purity
Because I don't trust people," Pip said. "Even my mom, who I do trust, has things she doesn't tell me, really important things, and it would be nice to have a way to find them out without her having to tell me. I'd know the stuff I need to know, but she'd still be OK. And then, with everyone else, literally everyone, I can never be sure of what they're thinking about me, and I don't seem to be very good at guessing what it is. So, it'd be nice to be able to just dip inside their heads, just for like two seconds, and make sure everything's OK-just be sure that they're not thinking some horrible thought about me that I have no clue about-and then I could trust them. I wouldn't abuse it or anything. It's just so hard not to ever trust people. It makes me have to work so hard to figure out what they want from me. It gets to be so tiring.
book-quote trust
Jonathan Franzen _ Purity
To her the strangest thought of all was that she might be extraordinarily appealing. It went against everything she believed in, or at least against everything she wanted to believe in; because, deep down, in her most honest heart, maybe every person considered herself extraordinarily appealing. Maybe this was just a human thing.
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Jonathan Franzen _ Purity
Lenin had been a risk-taker. Trotsky had been one, too, until Stalin had made him the Bill Gates of the Soviet Union, the excoriated crypto-reactionary.
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Jonathan Franzen _ Purity
If you substituted networks for socialism, you got the Internet. Its competing platforms were united in their ambition to define every term of your existence.
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Jonathan Franzen _ Purity
Like the old politburos, the new politburo styled itself as the enemy of the elite and the friend of the masses, dedicated to giving consumers what they wanted, but to Andrea {who, admittedly, had never learned how to want stuff} it seemed as if the Internet was governed more by fear: the fear of unpopularity and uncoolness, the fear of missing out, the fear of being flamed or forgotten. In the Republic, people had been terrified of the state; under the New Regime, what terrified them was the state of nature: kill or be killed, eat or be eaten.
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Jonathan Franzen _ Purity
Taken together, the animals reminded Pip that she was an animal herself; the multitude of shames she'd left behind in Oakland seemed of smaller consequence at Los Volcanes."
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Jonathan Franzen _ Purity
It's true I'm male and have some power, but I never asked to be born male. Maybe being male is like being born a predator, and maybe the only right thing for the predator to do, if it sympathizes with smaller animals and won't accept that it was born to kill them, is to betray its nature and starve to death. But maybe it's like something else-like being born with more money than others. Then the right thing to do becomes a more interesting social question.
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