Crossroads Quotes

“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

“The dream of a novel was more resilient than other kinds of dreaming. It could be interrupted in mid-sentence and snapped back into later.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Crossroads

“He was realizing too late that old people weren't entirely stupid.”
― 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

“Did his soul change every time it achieved a new insight? The very definition of a soul was immutability. Perhaps the root of his confusion was the conflation of soul and knowledge. Perhaps the soul was one of those tools built to do exactly one specific task, to know that I am I, and was mutable with respect to all other forms of knowledge?”
― 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

“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

“In the hush of the emptied campus, he could faintly hear the mightiness of Illinois, the rumble of a freight train, the moan of eighteen-wheelers, coal transported from the south, car parts from the north, fattened livestock and staggering corn yields from the middle, all roads leading to the broad-shouldered city on the lake.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Crossroads

“I think badness is the fundamental condition of humanity.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Crossroads

“Your father doesn’t look to our Savior but to what other men think of him. He preaches love but holds a grudge like no mans business.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Crossroads

“To me, there’s nothing realer in the world than God, and Satan is no less real. Sin is real and God’s forgiveness is real. That’s the message of the Gospel. But there’s not much in the Gospel about the afterlife—John is the only one who talks about it. And doesn’t that seem strange? If the afterlife is so important? When the rich young man asks Jesus how he might have eternal life, Jesus doesn’t give him a straight answer. He seems to say that heaven is loving God and obeying the commandments, and hell is being lost in sin—forsaking God. Father Fergus says I have to believe that Jesus is talking about a literal heaven and hell, because that’s what the Church teaches. But I’ve read those verses a hundred times. The rich young man asks about eternity, and Jesus tells him to give away his money. He says what to do in the present—as if the present is where you find eternity—and I think that’s right. Eternity is a mystery to us, just like God is a mystery. It doesn’t have to mean rejoicing in heaven or burning in hell. It could be a timeless state of grace or bottomless despair. I think there’s eternity in every second we’re alive.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Crossroads

“There was a kind of liberation in jettisoning all thought of being a good person.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Crossroads

“According to Scripture, earthly life was but a moment, but the moment seemed spacious when he was with her.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Crossroads

“Perhaps the soul was one of those tools built to do exactly one specific task, to know that I am I, and was mutable with respect to all other forms of knowledge?”
― Jonathan Franzen, Crossroads

“And so began the remainder of her life.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Crossroads

“It occurred to her that the Perry in her head had been nothing but a sentimental projection, extrapolated from the little boy he’d been. She didn’t know the real Perry any more than Russ knew the real her. “How”
― Jonathan Franzen, Crossroads

“...he [Perry Hildebrandt] broached the subject of goodness and its relation to intelligence. He'd come to the reception for selfless reasons, but he now saw that he might get not only a free buzz but free advise from, as it were, two professionals.

'I suppose what I'm asking,' he said, 'is whether goodness can ever truly be its own reward, or whether, consciously or not, it always serves some personal instrumentality.'

Reverend Walsh [Trinity Lutheran] and the rabbi [Meyer] exchanged glances in which Perry detected pleasant surprise. It gratified him to upset their expectations of a fifteen-year-old.

'Adam may have a different answer,' the rabbi said, but in the Jewish faith there is really only one measure of righteousness: Do you celebrate God and obey His commandments?'

'That would suggest,' Perry said, 'that goodness and God are essentially synonymous.'

'That's the idea,' the rabbi said. 'In biblical times, when God manifested Himself more directly. He could seem like quite the hard-ass--striking people blind for trivial offenses, telling Abraham to kill his son. But the essence of the Jewish faith is that God does what He does, and we obey Him.'

'So, in other words, it doesn't matter what a righteous person's private thoughts are, so long as he obeys the letter of God's commandments?'

'And worships Him, yes. Of course, at the level of folk wisdom, a man can be righteous without being a -mensch.- I'm sure you see this, too, Adam--the pious man who makes everyone around him miserable. That might be what Perry is asking about.'

'My question,' Perry said, 'is whether we can ever escape our selfishness. Even if you bring in God, and make him the measure of goodness, the person who worships and obeys Him still wants something for himself. He enjoys the feeling of being righteous, or he wants eternal life, or what have you. If you're smart enough to think about it, there's always some selfish angle.'

The rabbi smiled. 'There may be no way around it, when you put it like that. But we "bring in God," as you say--for the believer, of course, it's God who brought -us- in--to establish a moral order in which your question becomes irrelevant. When obedience is the defining principle, we don't need to police every little private thought we might have.'

'I think there's more to Perry's question, though,' Reverend Walsh said. 'I think he is pointing to sinfulness, which is our fundamental condition. In Christian faith, only one man has ever exemplified perfect goodness, and he was the Son of God. The rest of us can only hope for glimmers of what it's like to be truly good. When we perform an act of charity, or forgive an enemy, we feel the goodness of Christ in our hearts. We all have an innate capability to recognize true goodness, but we're also full of sin, and those two parts of us are constantly at war.'

'Exactly,' Perry said. 'How do I know if I'm really being good or if I'm just pursuing a sinful advantage?'

'The answer, I would say, is by listening to your heart. Only your heart can tell you what your true motive is--whether it partakes of Christ. I think my position is similar to Rabbi Meyer's. The reason we need faith--in our case, faith in the Lord Jesus Christ--is that it gives us a rock-solid basis for evaluating our actions. Only through faith in the perfection of our Savior, only by comparing our actions to his example, only by experiencing his living presence in our hearts, can we hope to be forgiven for the more selfish thoughts we might have. Only faith in Christ redeems us. Without him, we're lost in a sea of second-guessing our motives.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Crossroads

“It was strange that self-pity wasn't on the list of deadly sins; none was deadlier.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Crossroads

“A noseful of Cottrell ought to have sobered her, but somehow everything was interchangeable.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Crossroads

“It was unfair to have enjoyed her body when she was young and then burdened her with children and a thousand duties, only to now feel miserable whenever he had to venture into public with her and her sorry hair, her unavailing makeup, her seemingly self-spiting choice of dress. He pitied her for the unfairness; he felt guilty. But he couldn’t help blaming her, too, because her unattractiveness advertised unhappiness.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Crossroads

“I don’t deserve joy!'
'No one does. It’s a gift from God.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Crossroads

“The whole notion of coolness was puerile.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Crossroads

“He’d wondered about Kitty’s implication—whether she considered him uniquely good and trustworthy, or uniquely unsexed and unmanly and unthreatening. Either way, the effect had been to make his impending date with Frances feel more thrillingly illicit. In anticipation of it, he’d smuggled out of his house and into the church his final selection of blues records and a grimy old coat, a sheepskin thing from Arizona, that he hoped might lend him a bit of an edge. In Arizona, he’d had an edge, and, fairly or not, he believed that what had dulled it was his marriage.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Crossroads

“I’m the fat little humiliation he’s married to.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Crossroads

“It was awkward to be called dear by a person you felt like calling insufferable bitch.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Crossroads

“Evil had pursued her all her life, and now the world was exploding with the color of it, and nowhere was there refuge.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Crossroads

“You have some fine qualities, but imagination was never one of them.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Crossroads

“three Crossroads sophomores were shoveling snow with a zeal that suggested their work was voluntary.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Crossroads

“After she died and Becky’s mother pronounced her judgment, Becky understood what a survival mechanism disdain had been for her aunt, who had few other defenses against an uncaring world. For Becky herself, disdain was more of an emergency measure, taken only when someone directly tried to make her feel bad.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Crossroads

“Clem couldn’t stand to be in the same room with him. He was giving up his student deferment to show his father what a strong man did.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Crossroads