rinne

“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.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Crossroads

“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.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Crossroads

“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.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Crossroads

“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.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Crossroads