Adolescence is best enjoyed without self-consciousness, but self-consciousness, unfortunately, is its leading symptom. Even when something important happens to you, even when your heart's getting crushed or exalted, even when you're absorbed in building the foundations of a personality, there comes these moments when you're aware that what's happening is not the real story. Unless you actually die, the real story is still ahead of you. This alone, this cruel mixture of consciousness and irrelevance, this built-in hollowness, is enough to account for how pissed off you are. You're miserable and ashamed if you don't believe your adolescent troubles matter, but you're stupid if you do.
Jonathan FranzenAbout author
- Author's profession: Novelist
- Nationality: american
- Born: August 17, 1959
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in the cupboard sits my bottlelike a dwarf waiting to scratch out my prayers. I drink and cough like some idiot at a symphony, sunlight and maddened birds are everywhere, the phone rings gamboling its soundagainst the odds of the crooked sea; I drink deeply and evenly now, I drink to paradiseand deathand the lie of love.
Charles Bukowski