Jonathan Safran Foer - Everything is Illuminated (2002)

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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
I will describe my eyes and then begin the story. My eyes are blue and resplendent. Now I will begin the story.

Jonathan Safran Foer
I could not believe in a God that would challenge faith like this.

Jonathan Safran Foer
[...]It is as if after surviving so much, there was no longer reason to survive.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Everything is the way it is because everything was the way it was. Sometimes I feel ensnared in this, as if no matter what I do, what will come has already been fixed.

Jonathan Safran Foer
But more than that, no unloving words were ever spoken, and everything was held up as another small piece of proof that it can be this way, it doesn't have to be that way; if there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it heavy 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 jeweler'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
What is being awake if not interpreting our dreams, or dreaming if not interpreting our wake?

Jonathan Safran Foer
Tomorrow was over the horizon, and would take an entire day to reach.

Jonathan Safran Foer
It would be possible, in theory, for life and art to be reversed.

Jonathan Safran Foer
"You do not have to present not-truths to me, Sasha. I am not a child."(But I do. That is what you always fail to understand. I present not-truths in order to protect you. That is also why I try so inflexibly to be a funny person. Everything is to protect you. I exist in case you need to be protected.)

Jonathan Safran Foer
Suddenly Yankel was overcome with a fear of dying, stronger than he felt when his parents passed of natural causes, stronger than when his only brother was killed in the flour mill or when his children died, stronger even than when he was a child and it first occurred to him that he must try to understand what it could mean not to be alive — to be not in darkness, not in unfeeling — to be not being, not to be.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Do you think I'm wonderful? she asked him one day as they leaned against the trunk of a petrified maple. No, he said. Why? Because so many girls are wonderful. I imagine hundreds of men have called their loves wonderful today, and it's only noon. You couldn't be something that hundreds of others are.

Jonathan Safran Foer
It was inevitable: Yankel fell in love with his never-wife. He would wake from sleep to miss the weight that never depressed the bed next to him, remember in earnest the weight of gestures she never made, long for the un-weight of her un-arm slung over his too-real chest, making his widower's rememberences that much more convincing and his pain that much more real.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Life was a small negative space cut out of the eternal solidity, and for the first time, it felt precious - not like all of the words that had come to mean nothing, but like the last breath of a drowning victim.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Was his death an essential stage in the continuation of his life?

Jonathan Safran Foer
But what she was really trying to say was this: I like music better than anything in the world, after you.

Jonathan Safran Foer
It feels like a moment I've lived a thousand times before, as if everything is familiar, right up to the moment of my death, that it will happen again an infinite number of times, that we will meet, marry, have our children, succeed in the ways we have, fail in the ways we have, all exactly the same, always unable to change a thing. I am again at the bottom of an unstoppable wheel, and when I feel my eyes close for death, as they have and will a thousand times, I awake.

Jonathan Safran Foer
There are only so many times that you can utter 'It does not hurt' before it begins to hurt even more than the hurt. You become enlightened of the feeling of feeling hurt, which is worse, I am certain, than the existent hurt.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Once you hear something, you can never return to the time before you heard it.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Worthy would-be worlds of words, whorls of working wonder.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Well, let me leave it at this: if God does exist, He would have a great deal be sad about. And if He doesn't exist, then that too would make Him quite sad, I imagine. So to answer your question, God must be sad.

Jonathan Safran Foer
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
She was with me. She did all of those things and so many more, things I would never tell anyone, and she never even loved me. Now that's love.

Jonathan Safran Foer
A map such as that one is worth many hundreds, and as luck will have it, thousands of dollars. But more than this, it is a remembrance of that time before our planet was so small. When this map was made, I thought, you could live without knowing where you were not living.

Jonathan Safran Foer
In the water I saw my father's face, and that face saw the face of its father, and so on, and so on, reflecting backward to the beginning of time, to the face of God, in whose image we were created.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Everything I did, I did because I thought it was the correct thing to do… I am not a hero, it is true… But I am not a bad person, either.

Jonathan Safran Foer
It is not a thing that you can imagine. It only is. After that, there can be no imagining.

Jonathan Safran Foer
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.

Jonathan Safran Foer