“ Shyness is when you turn your head away from something you want. ”
- Jonathan Safran Foer- Copy
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“ You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness. ”
- Jonathan Safran Foer- Copy
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“ One day you will do things for me that you hate. That is what it means to be family. ”
- Jonathan Safran Foer- Copy
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“ Why didn’t I learn to treat everything like it was the last time. My greatest regret was how much I believed in the future. ”
- Jonathan Safran Foer Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close- Copy
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“ We believed in our grandmother’s cooking more fervently than we believed in God. ”
- Jonathan Safran Foer- Copy
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“ ‘I love you’ means that I accept you for the person that you are, and that I do not wish to change you into someone else. It means that I will love you and stand by you even through the worst of times. It means loving you even when you’re in a bad mood, or too tired to do the things I want to do. It means loving you when you’re down, not just when you’re fun to be with. ‘I love you’ means that I know your deepest secrets and do not judge you for them, asking in return that you do not judge me for mine. It means that I care enough to fight for what we have and that I love you enough not to let go. It means thinking of you, dreaming of you, wanting and needing you constantly, and hoping you feel the same way for me. ”
- Jonathan Safran Foer- Copy
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“ I love you also means I love you more than anyone loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that no one loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that I love no one else, and never have loved anyone else, and never will love anyone else. ”
- Jonathan Safran Foer- Copy
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“ You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness. ”
- Jonathan Safran Foer- Copy
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“ She was a genius of sadness, immersing herself in it, separating its numerous strands, appreciating its subtle nuances. She was a prism through which sadness could be divided into its infinite spectrum. ”
- Jonathan Safran Foer- Copy
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“ I am always sad, I think. Perhaps this signifies that I am not sad at all, because sadness is something lower than your normal disposition, and I am always the same thing. Perhaps I am the only person in the world, then, who never becomes sad. Perhaps I am lucky. ”
- Jonathan Safran Foer- Copy
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“ He awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounded and as impossible as it actually was, happy. And during the course of each day his heart would descend from his chest into his stomach. By early afternoon he was overcome by the feeling that nothing was right, or nothing was right for him, and by the desire to be alone. By evening he was fulfilled: alone in the magnitude of his grief, alone in his aimless guilt, alone even in his loneliness. I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others–the only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad. I am not sad. I am not sad. Because his life had unlimited potential for happiness, insofar as it was an empty white room. He would fall asleep with his heart at the foot of his bed, like some domesticated animal that was no part of him at all. And each morning he would wake with it again in the cupboard of his rib cage, having become a little heavier, a little weaker, but still pumping. And by the midafternoon he was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else. I am not sad. ”
- Jonathan Safran Foer- Copy
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“ She was like a drowning person, flailing, reaching for anything that might save her. Her life was an urgent, desperate struggle to justify her life. ”
- Jonathan Safran Foer- Copy
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“ Time was passing like a hand waving from a train I wanted to be on. I hope you never have to think about anything as much as I think about you. ”
- Jonathan Safran Foer- Copy
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“ If there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it walls, and we will furnish it with soft, red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweller's felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does. ”
- Jonathan Safran Foer- Copy
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“ The more you love someone, he came to think, the harder it is to tell them. It surprised him that strangers didn't stop each other on the street to say I love you. ”
- Jonathan Safran Foer- Copy
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“ In bed that night I invented a special drain that would be underneath every pillow in New York, and would connect to the reservoir. Whenever people cried themselves to sleep, the tears would all go to the same place, and in the morning the weatherman could report if the water level of the Reservoir of Tears had gone up or down, and you could know if New York is in heavy boots. ”
- Jonathan Safran Foer- Copy
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“ Why are you leaving me? He wrote, I do not know how to live. I do not know either but I am trying. I do not know how to try. There were some things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him. So i buried them and let them hurt me ”
- Jonathan Safran Foer- Copy
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“ Every widow wakes one morning, perhaps after years of pure and unwavering grieving, to realize she slept a good night's sleep, and will be able to eat breakfast, and doesn't hear her husband's ghost all the time, but only some of the time. Her grief is replaced with a useful sadness. Every parent who loses a child finds a way to laugh again. The timbre begins to fade. The edge dulls. The hurt lessens. Every love is carved from loss. Mine was. Yours is. Your greatgreatgreatgrandchildren's will be. But we learn to live in that love. ”
- Jonathan Safran Foer- Copy
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“ I wanted to tell her everything, maybe if I'd been able to, we could have lived differently, maybe I'd be there with you now instead of here. Maybe... if I'd said, 'I'm so afraid of losing something I love that I refuse to love anything,' maybe that would have made the impossible possible. Maybe, but I couldn't do it, I had buried too much too deeply inside me. And here I am, instead of there. ”
- Jonathan Safran Foer- Copy
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“ I imagine a line, a white line, painted on the sand and on the ocean, from me to you. ”
- Jonathan Safran Foer- Copy
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“ You are the only one who has understood even a whisper of me, and I will tell you that I am the only person who has understood even a whisper of you. ”
- Jonathan Safran Foer- Copy
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“ I went to a tattoo parlor and had YES written onto the palm of my left hand, and NO onto my right palm, what can I say, it hasn't made my life wonderful, its made life possible, when I rub my hands against each other in the middle of winter I am warming myself with the friction of YES and NO, when I clap my hands I am showing my appreciation through the uniting and parting of YES and NO, I signify "book" by peeling open my hands, every book, for me, is the balance of YES and NO, even this one, my last one, especially this one. Does it break my heart, of course, every moment of every day, into more pieces than my heart was made of, I never thought of myself as quiet, much less silent, I never thought about things at all, everything changed, the distance that wedged itself between me and my happiness wasn't the world, it wasn't the bombs and burning buildings, it was me, my thinking, the cancer of never letting go, is ignorance bliss, I don't know, but it's so painful to think, and tell me, what did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever bring me? I think and think and think, I've thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it. ”
- Jonathan Safran Foer- Copy
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“ Brod's life was a slow realization that the world was not for her, and that for whatever reason, she would never be happy and honest at the same time. She felt as if she were brimming, always producing and hoarding more love inside her. But there was no release... So she had to satisfy herself with the idea of loveloving the loving of things whose existence she didn't care at all about. Love itself became the object of her love. She loved herself in love, she loved loving love, as love loves loving, and was able, in that way, to reconcile herself with a world that fell so short of what she would have hoped for. It was not the world that was the great and saving lie, but her willingness to make it beautiful and fair, to live a onceremoved life, in a world onceremoved from the one in which everyone else seemed to exist. ”
- Jonathan Safran Foer- Copy
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“ He promised us that everything would be okay. I was a child, but I knew that everything would not be okay. That did not make my father a liar. It made him my father. ”
- Jonathan Safran Foer- Copy
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“ She let out a laugh, and then she put her hand over her mouth, like she was angry at herself for forgetting her sadness. ”
- Jonathan Safran Foer- Copy
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“ Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living. ”
- Jonathan Safran Foer- Copy
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“ Why didn't I learn to treat everything like it was the last time. My greatest regret was how much I believed in the future. ”
- Jonathan Safran Foer- Copy
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“ It was not the feeling of completeness I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty. ”
- Jonathan Safran Foer- Copy
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