Jonathan Franzen Quotes About Surrender

Quotes about: Surrender

• Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are. And this is why love, as I understand it, is always specific. Trying to love all of humanity may be a worthy endeavor, but, in a funny way, it keeps the focus on the self, on the self’s own moral or spiritual well-being. Whereas, to love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.

  Jonathan Franzen

  Spiritual, Real, Struggle

  Jonathan Franzen (2012). “Farther Away: Essays”, p.9, Macmillan

• Depression, when it's clinical, is not a metaphor. It runs in families, and it's known to respond to medication and to counseling. However truly you believe there's a sickness to existence that can never be cured, if you're depressed you will sooner or later surrender and say: I just don't want to feel bad anymore. The shift from depressive realism to tragic realism, from being immobilized by darkness to being sustained by it, thus strangely seems to require believing in the possibility of a cure.

  Jonathan Franzen

  Running, Depressing, Believe

• [T]o love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.

  Jonathan Franzen

  Love, Struggle, Self

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