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

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We cracked up together, which was necessary, because she loved me again.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Being with him made my brain quiet. I didn't have to invent a thing.

Jonathan Safran Foer
She said, 'Believe it or not, I used to be idealistic.' I asked her what 'idealistic' meant. 'It means you live by what you think is right.' 'You don't do that anymore?' 'There are questions I don't ask anymore.

Jonathan Safran Foer
I try not to remember the life that I didn't want to lose but lost and have to remember

Jonathan Safran Foer
I knew that our time together was almost over, I asked her if she liked sports, she asked me if I liked chess, I asked her if she liked fallen trees, she went home with her father, the center of me followed her, but I was left with the shell of me, I needed to see her again, I couldn't explain my need to myself, and that's why it was such a beautiful need, there's nothing wrong with not understanding yourself.

Jonathan Safran Foer
I wasn't trying to invent better and better homes, but to show her that homes didn't matter, we could live in any home, in any city, in any country, in any century, and be happy, as if the world were just what we lived in.

Jonathan Safran Foer
I realized I was on a something island. 'How did I get here,' I wondered, surrounded by Nothing, "and how can I get back?

Jonathan Safran Foer
He had a wall of masks from every country he'd been to, like Armenia and Chile and Ethiopia. It's not a horrible world, he told me, but it's filled with a lot of horrible people.

Jonathan Safran Foer
I desperately wish I had my tambourine with me now, because even after everything I'm still wearing heavy boots, and sometimes it helps to play a good beat

Jonathan Safran Foer
I wanted to touch him, to tell him that even if everyone left everyone, I would never leave him, he talked and talked, his words fell through him, trying to find the floor to his sadness.

Jonathan Safran Foer
She laughed enough to migrate an entire flock of birds. That was how she said yes

Jonathan Safran Foer
We talked about nothing in particular, but it felt like we were talking about the most important things...

Jonathan Safran Foer
I spent my life learning to feel less.
Every day I felt less.
Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?
You can not protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Isn't it so weird how the number of dead people is increasing even though the Earth stays the same size, so that one day there isn't going to be room to bury anyone anymore?

Jonathan Safran Foer
He Wrote, Are you OK? I told him, My eyes are crummy. He wrote, But are you OK? I told him, That's a very complicated question. He wrote, That's a very simple answer. I asked, Are you OK? He wrote, Some mornings I wake up feeling grateful.

Jonathan Safran Foer
"It's easy to be emotional. You can always make a scene... Highs and lows make you feel that things matter, but they're nothing." "So what's something?" "Being reliable is something. Being good."

Jonathan Safran Foer
I felt that night, on the stage, incredibly close to everything in the universe, but also extremely alone. I wondered, for the first time in my life, if life was worth all the work it took to live. What exactly made it worth it? What's so horrible about being dead forever, and not feeling anything, and not even dreaming? What's so great about feeling and dreaming?

Jonathan Safran Foer
I flipped back through the pad of paper while I thought about what Stephen Hawking would do next.

Jonathan Safran Foer
I put my hand on the doorknob because I thought maybe her hand was on the doorknob on the other side.

Jonathan Safran Foer
I would have done anything for him. Maybe that was my sickness.

Jonathan Safran Foer
She wrote, I wish I could be a girl again, with a chance to live my life again. I have suffered so much more than I needed to. And the joys I have felt have not always been joyous. I could have lived differently.

Jonathan Safran Foer
It was terrible. All of the things we couldn't share. The room was filled with conversations we weren't having.

Jonathan Safran Foer
It broke my heart into more pieces than my heart was made of, why can't people say what they mean at the time?

Jonathan Safran Foer
We were trying to make our lives easier, trying, with all our rules, to make life effortless. But a friction began to arise between Nothing and Something, in the morning the Nothing vase cast a Something shadow, like the memory of someone you've lost, what can you say about that, at night the Nothing light spilled from the guest room spilled under the Nothing door and stained the Something hallway, there's nothing to say.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Also, I designed a pretty fascinating bracelet, where you put a rubber band around your favorite book of poems for a year, and then you take it off and wear it.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Each day has been chained to the previous one. But the weeks have wings. Anyone who believes that a second is faster than a decade did not live my life.

Jonathan Safran Foer
I tried to think about other things. I tried to invent optimistic inventions. But the pessimistic ones were extremely loud.

Jonathan Safran Foer
We need enormous pockets, pockets big enough for our families and our friends, and even the people who aren't on our lists, people we've never met but still want to protect. We need pockets for boroughs and for cities, a pocket that could hold the universe.

Jonathan Safran Foer
The meaning of my thoughts started to float away from me, like leaves that fall from a tree into a river, I was the tree, the world was the river.

Jonathan Safran Foer
We are lying to ourselves and to each other. Lying about what? I don't care if we're lying. I am a bad person. I don't care. I don't care what you are.

Jonathan Safran Foer