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Book: The End of the End of the Earth: Essays
Quotes of Book: The End of the End of the
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  1. Jonathan Franzen _ The End of the End of the

    Invisible Facebook and Google algorithms steer you toward content you agree with, and nonconforming voices stay silent for fear of being flamed or trolled or unfriended. The result is a silo in which, whatever side you're on, you feel absolutely right to hate what you hate.
    book-quote

  2. Jonathan Franzen _ The End of the End of the

    Attempting to write an honest essay doesn't alter the multiplicity of my selves. What changes, if I take the time to stop and measure, is that my multi-selved identity acquires substance."
    book-quote

  3. Jonathan Franzen _ The End of the End of the

    The thing about games is that you don't want to look too closely at why you're playing them. A great yawning emptiness underlies them, a close relative of the nothingness that lies beneath the surface of our busy lives.
    book-quote

  4. Jonathan Franzen _ The End of the End of the

    Kierkegaard, in 'Either/Or,' makes fun of the 'busy man' for whom busyness is a way of avoiding an honest self-reckoning. You might wake up in the middle of the night and realize that you're lonely in your marriage, or that you need to think about what your level of consumption is doing to the planet, but the next day you have a million little things to do, and the day after that you have another million things. As long as there's no end of little things, you never have to stop and confront the bigger questions. Writing or reading an essay isn't the only way to stop and ask yourself who you really are and what your life might mean, but it is one good way. And if you consider how laughably unbusy Kierkegaard's Copenhagen was, compared with our own age, those subjective tweets and hasty blog posts don't seem so essayistic. They seem more like means of avoiding what a real essay might force on us. We spend our days reading, on screens, stuff we'd never bother reading in a printed book, and bitch about how busy we are.
    book-quote
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