Memorable Quotes from Jonathan Franzen's Freedom

She knew that you could love somebody more than anything and still not love the person all that much, if you were busy with other things. (p. 42)

“I know essentially nothing about sex,” Walter confessed.
“Oh, well,” she said, “it’s not very complicated.”
And so began the happiest years of their life.  (p. 129)

“It’s good to have friends in life,” she said. “If you want to have friends, you have to remember that nobody’s perfect.”  (p. 137)

For the prosecution: The problem wasn’t between Walter and Joey. The problem was between Patty and Walter, and she knew it.
For the defense: She loves Walter!
For the prosecution: The evidence suggests otherwise.
For the defense: Well in that case, Walter doesn’t love her, either. He doesn’t love the real her. He loves some wrong idea of her.
For the prosecution: That would be convenient if only it were true. Unfortunately for Patty, he didn’t marry her in spite of who she was, he married her because of it. Nice people don’t necessarily fall in love with nice people.
For the defense: It isn’t fair to say she doesn’t love him!
For the prosecution: If she can’t behave herself, it doesn’t matter if she loves him.  (pp. 147-148)

...there came a stretch of minutes in which they lay and held each other in the quiet majesty of long marriage, forgot themselves in shared sadness and forgiveness for everything they’d inflicted on each other, and rested.     (p. 330)

Meanwhile the country was at war, but it was an odd sort of war in which, within a rounding error, the only casualties were on the other side. (p. 399)

And it was a strange thing to feel, but he definitely felt it: when he emerged from the bathroom with the ring on his ring finger, and Jenna rushed past him and then reeled out again, squealing and cursing the stench, he was a different person. He could see this person so clearly, it was like standing outside himself. He was the person who’d handled his own shit to get his wedding ring back. This wasn’t the person he’d thought he was, or would have chosen to be if he’d been free to choose, but there was something comforting and liberating about being an actual definite someone, rather than a collection of contradictory potential someones. (p. 432)