Jonathan Safran Foer - Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005)

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Then I have some bad news for you, because humans are going to destroy each other as soon as it becomes easy enough to, which will be very soon.

Jonathan Safran Foer
We were quiet on the car ride home. I turned on the radio and found a station playing "Hey Jude." It was true, I didn't want to make it bad. I wanted to take the sad song and make it better. It's just that I didn't know how.

Jonathan Safran Foer
I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love.

Jonathan Safran Foer
My dream went all the way back to the beginning. The rain rose into the clouds, and the animals descended the ramp.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Shyness is when you turn your head away from something you want. Shame is when you turn your head away from something you do not want.

Jonathan Safran Foer
"Stalin found out about the community and sent his thugs in, just a few days before I got there, to break all of their arms! That was worse than killing them! It was a horrible sight, Oskar: their arms in crude splints, straight in front of them like zombies! They couldn't feed themselves, because they couldn't get their hands to their mouths! So you know what they did!" "They starved?" "They fed each other! That's the difference between heaven and hell! In hell we starve! In heaven we feed each other!" I don't believe in the afterlife." "Neither do I, but I believe in the story."

Jonathan Safran Foer
Why didn't he say goodbye? I gave myself a bruise. Why didn't he say 'I love you'?

Jonathan Safran Foer
I said I kicked a French chicken in the stomach once." "Huh?" "It said, 'Oeuf.'" "What is that?" "It's a joke. Do you want to hear another, or have you already had un oeuf?

Jonathan Safran Foer
I said, 'I need to know how he died.' He flipped back and pointed at, 'Why?' So I can stop inventing how he died. I'm always inventing.

Jonathan Safran Foer
She died in my arms saying, "I don't want to die." That is what death is like. It doesn't matter what uniforms the soldiers are wearing. It doesn't matter how good the weapons are. I thought if everyone could see what I saw, we could never have war anymore.

Jonathan Safran Foer
And here I am, instead of there. I'm sitting in this library, thousands of miles from my life, writing another letter I know I won't be able to send, no matter how hard I try and how much I want to. How did that boy making love behind that shed become this man writing this letter at this table?

Jonathan Safran Foer
She wanted more, more slang, more figures of speech, the bee's knees, the cats pajamas, horse of a different color, dog-tired, she wanted to talk like she was born here, like she never came from anywhere else

Jonathan Safran Foer
A few weeks after the worst day, I started writing lots of letters. I don't know why, but it was one of the only things that made my boots lighter.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Because it was starting to get dark, and because the streets were crowded, I bumped into a googolplex people. Who were they? Where were they going? What were they looking for? I wanted to hear their heartbeats, and I wanted them to hear mine.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Mom said, "His spirit is there," and that made me really angry. I told her, "Dad didn't have a spirit! He had cells!" "His memory is there." "His memory is here," I said, pointing at my head. "Dad had a spirit," she said, like she was rewinding a bit in our conversation. I told her, "He had cells, and now they're on rooftops, and in the river, and in the lungs of millions of people around New York, who breathe him every time they speak!

Jonathan Safran Foer
It took me as long as I had known him to get rid of all of his words. Like turning an hourglass over.

Jonathan Safran Foer
I shook my tambourine the whole time, because it helped me remember that even though I was going through different neighborhoods, I was still me.

Jonathan Safran Foer
It's hard to say goodbye to the place you've lived. It can be as hard as saying goodbye to a person.

Jonathan Safran Foer
I asked her, "Are you an optimist or a pessimist?" She looked at her watch and said, "I'm optimistic." "Then I have some bad news for you, because humans are going to destroy each others as soon as it becomes easy enough to, which will be very soon." "Why do beautiful songs make you sad?" "Because they aren't true." "Never?" "Nothing is beautiful and true." She smiled, but in a way that wasn't just happy, and said, "You sound just like Dad.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Things were happening around us, but nothing was happening between us.

Jonathan Safran Foer
It is my great hope that our paths, however long and winding, will cross again.

Jonathan Safran Foer
He was leaving me. I wondered if I should stop him. If I should wrestle him to the ground and force him to love me. I wanted to hold his shoulders down and shout into his face.

Jonathan Safran Foer
She had fallen in love so many times that she began to suspect she was not falling in love at all, but doing something much more ordinary.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Ray Black was in prison, so we weren't able to talk to him. I did some research on the internet and found out that he was in prison because he murdered two children after he raped them. There were also pictures of the dead children, and even though I knew it would only hurt me to look at them, I did. I printed them out and put them in *Stuff That Happened To Me*, right after the picture of Jean-Pierre Haigneré, the french astronaut who had to be carried from his spacecraft after returning form the MIR spacestation, because gravity isn't only what makes us fall, it's what makes our muscles strong.

Jonathan Safran Foer
It's so beautiful at this hour. The sun is low, the shadows are long, the air is cold and clean. You won't be awake for another five hours, but I can't help feeling that we're sharing this clear and beautiful morning.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Because he had been waiting for someone to come back to him, so every time someone knocked on the door, he couldn't stop himself from hoping it might be that person, even though he knew he shouldn't hope.

Jonathan Safran Foer
I went to the guest room and pretended to write. I hit the space bar again and again and again. My life story was spaces.

Jonathan Safran Foer
In the end, everyone loses everyone. There was no invention to get around that, and so I felt, that night, like the turtle that everything else in the universe was on top of.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Just because you're an atheist, that doesn't mean you wouldn't love for things to have reasons for why they are.

Jonathan Safran Foer
There were 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