Jonathan Safran Foer - Everything is Illuminated (2002)

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Every night before putting her to sleep, Yankel counts her ribs, as if one might have disappeared in the course of the day and become the seed and soil for some new companion to steal her away from him.

Jonathan Safran Foer
We all choose things, and we also all choose against things. I want to be the kind of person who chooses for more than chooses against...

Jonathan Safran Foer
And the general shot my sister. I could not look at her, but I remember the sound of when she hit the ground. I hear that sound when things hit the ground still. Anything.' If I could, I would make it so nothing ever hit the ground again.

Jonathan Safran Foer
The images of his infinite pasts and infinite futures washed over him as he waited, paralyzed, in the present.

Jonathan Safran Foer
This is my heart. You are touching it with your left hand. You are touching it with your left hand, not because you are left-handed, although you might be, but because I am holding it against my heart. What you are feeling is the beating of my heart. It is what keeps me alive.

Jonathan Safran Foer
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 great-great-great-children's will be. But we learn to live with that love.

Jonathan Safran Foer
She wanted nothing more than someone to miss, to touch, with whom to speak like a child, with whom to be a child.

Jonathan Safran Foer
SADNESSES OF THE COVENANT: Sadness of God's love; Sadness of God's back [sic]; Favorite-child sadness; Sadness of b[ein]g sad in front of one's God; Sadness of the opposite of belief [sic]; What if? Sadness; Sadness of God alone in heaven; Sadness of a God who would need people to pray to Him...

Jonathan Safran Foer
Family are the people who must make you feel ashamed when you are deserving of shame.

Jonathan Safran Foer
She was so beautiful, like someone who you will never meet, but always dream of meeting, like someone who is too good for you.

Jonathan Safran Foer
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
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
The Eskimos have four hundred words for snow, and the Jewshave four hundred for schmuck.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Oh,' she said. 'I have never seen a Jew before. Can I see his horns?

Jonathan Safran Foer
I saw Herschel and he saw me and we stood next to each other because that is what friends do in the presence of evil or love.

Jonathan Safran Foer
He removed several pages of death certificates, which were picked up by another breeze and sent into the trees. Some would fall with the leaves that September. Some would fall with the trees generations later.

Jonathan Safran Foer
And she would say, "Today you believe in God?" And he would say, "Today I believe in love".

Jonathan Safran Foer
And so it was when anyone tried to speak: their minds would become tangled in remembrance. Words became floods of thought with no beginning or end, and would drown the speaker before he could reach the life raft of the point he was trying to make. It was impossible to remember what one meant, what, after all of the words, was intended.

Jonathan Safran Foer
I think it's very pretty. Can it be pretty if no one thinks it's pretty? I think it's pretty. If you're the only one? That's pretty pretty. And what about the boys? Don't you want them to think you're pretty? I wouldn't want a boy to think I was pretty unless he was the kind of boy who thought I was pretty.

Jonathan Safran Foer
I dreamt four nights ago of clock hands descending from the universe like rain, of the moon as a green eye, of mirrors and insects, of a love that never withdrew. It was not the feeling of completeness that I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty.

Jonathan Safran Foer
She spent the afternoon staring at their front door. "Waiting for someone?" Yankel asked. "What color is this?" He stood very close to the door, letting the end of his nose touch the peephole. He licked the wood and joked, "It certainly tastes like red." "Yes, it is red, isn't it?" "Seems so." She buried her head in her hands. "But couldn't it be just a bit more red?"

Jonathan Safran Foer
What? she said once to herself, and then once aloud, What? She felt a total displacement, like a spinning globe brought to a sudden halt by the light touch of a finger. How did she end up here, like this? How could there have been so much - so many moments, so many people and things, so many razors and pillows, timepieces and subtle coffins - without her being aware? How did her life live itself without her?

Jonathan Safran Foer
He couldn't bear to live, but he couldn't bear to die. He couldn't bear the thought of he making love to someone else, but neither could he bear the absence of the thought. And as for the note, he couldn't bear to keep it, but he couldn't bear to destroy it either.

Jonathan Safran Foer
The bruises go away, and so does how you hate, and so does the feeling that everything you receive from life is something you have earned.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Grandfather kicked the stop pedal, and my face gave a high-five to the front window.

Jonathan Safran Foer
She repeats things until they are true, or until she can't tell whether they are true or not. She has become an expert at confusing what is with what was with what should be with what could be.

Jonathan Safran Foer
My friends are appeased to stay in Odessa for their entire lives. They are appeased to age like their parents, and become parents like their parents. They do not desire anything more than everything they have known.

Jonathan Safran Foer
This is the sixty-nine," I told him, presenting the magazine in front of him. I put my fingers — two of them — on the action, so that he would not overlook it. "Why is it dubbed sixty-nine?" he asked, because he is a person hot on fire with curiosity. "It was invented in 1969. My friend Gregory knows a friend of the nephew of the inventor." "What did people do before 1969?" "Merely blowjobs and masticating box, but never in chorus.

Jonathan Safran Foer
They learned to hate her unknowability, her untouchability, the collage of her.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Memories are small prayers to God, if we believed in that sort of thing.

Jonathan Safran Foer