Jonathan Safran Foer - Everything is Illuminated (2002)

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I used to think that humor was the only way to appreciate how wonderful and terrible the world is, to celebrate how big life is. But now I think the opposite. Humor is a way of shrinking from that wonderful and terrible world.

Jonathan Safran Foer
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
Accepting the compromise of the way we have been, the way we are, and the way we will likely be... may we live together in unwavering love and good health, amen.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Sadness of not knowing enough words to [express what you mean]...

Jonathan Safran Foer
It's so hard to express yourself.' I understand this.' I want to express myself.' The same is true for me.' I'm looking for my voice.' It's in your mouth.' I want to do something I'm not ashamed of.' Something you are proud of, yes?' Not even. I just don't want to be ashamed.

Jonathan Safran Foer
I am doing something I hate for you. This is what it means to be in love.

Jonathan Safran Foer
She was not crying Which surprised me very much But I understand now That she had found places For her melancholy That were behind more masks Than only her eyes

Jonathan Safran Foer
The only thing more painful than being an active forgetter is to be an inert rememberer.

Jonathan Safran Foer
One day you will do things for me that you hate. That is what it means to be family.

Jonathan Safran Foer
SADNESSES OF THE INTELLECT: Sadness of being misunderstood [sic]; Humor sadness; Sadness of love wit[hou]t release; Sadne[ss of be]ing smart; Sadness of not knowing enough words to [express what you mean]; Sadness of having options; Sadness of wanting sadness; Sadness of confusion; Sadness of domes[tic]ated birds; Sadness of fini[shi]ng a book; Sadness of remembering; Sadness of forgetting; Anxiety sadness...

Jonathan Safran Foer
(What are your ghosts like?) (They are on the insides of the lids of my eyes.) (This is also where my ghosts reside.) (You have ghosts?) (Of course I have ghosts.) (But you are a child.) (I am not a child.) (But you have not known love.) (These are my ghosts, the spaces amid love.)

Jonathan Safran Foer
It's true, I am afraid of dying. I am afraid of the world moving forward without me, of my absence going unnoticed, or worse, being some natural force propelling life on. Is it selfish? Am I such a bad person for dreaming of a world that ends when I do? I don't mean the world ending with respect to me, but every set of eyes closing with mine.

Jonathan Safran Foer
We burned with love for ourselves, all of us, starters of the fire we suffered- our love was the affliction for which only our love was the cure.

Jonathan Safran Foer
I imagine a line, a white line, painted on the sand and on the ocean, from me to you.

Jonathan Safran Foer
So many visitors came to rub and kiss different parts of him for the fulfillment of their various wishes that his entire body had to be rebronzed every month. He was a changing god, destroyed and recreated by his believers, destroyed and recreated by their belief... Those who prayed came to believe less and less in the god of their creation and more and more in their belief.

Jonathan Safran Foer
I used to tuck her … but now she tucked my feelings into the woven arteries of my veins.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Memory was supposed to fill the time, but it made time a hole to be filled.

Jonathan Safran Foer
In my family, Father is the world champion at ending conversations.

Jonathan Safran Foer
She maintained a careful balance by her window, never allowing the men to come too close, never allowing them to stray too far.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Books are for those without real lives, he thought. And they are no real replacement.

Jonathan Safran Foer
He was someone whom everyone admired and liked but whom nobody knew. He was like a book that you could feel good holding, that you could talk about without ever having read, that you could recommend.

Jonathan Safran Foer
They reciprocated the great and saving lie—that our love for things is greater than our lover for our love for things—willfully playing the parts they wrote for themselves, willfully creating and believing fictions necessary for life.

Jonathan Safran Foer
This is love, she thought, isn't it? When you notice someone's absence and hate that absence more than anything? More, even, than you love his presence?

Jonathan Safran Foer
She avoids mirrors, and lifts a powerful telescope to find herself.

Jonathan Safran Foer
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. Table, ivory elephant charm, rainbow, onion, hairdo, mollusk, Shabbos, violence, cuticle, melodrama, ditch, honey, doily … None of it moved her. She addressed her world honestly, searching for something deserving of the volumes of love she knew she had within her, but to each she would have to say, I don't love you.

Jonathan Safran Foer