"Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living"
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"If there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it 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 jeweller'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 (Everything is Illuminated: A Novel)

"I'm sorry for my inability to let unimportant things go, for my inability to hold on to the important things."
— Jonathan Safran Foer

"I think and think and think, I‘ve thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it."
— 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

"Why didn't I learn to treat everything like it was the last time. My greatest regret was how much I believed in the future."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"She wants to know if I love her, that's all anyone wants from anyone else, not love itself but the knowledge that love is there, like new batteries in the flashlight in the emergency kit in the hall closet."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"It has shown me that everything is illuminated in the light of the past. It is always along the side of us...on the inside, looking out. "
— Jonathan Safran Foer

"When I looked at you, my life made sense. Even the bad things made sense. They were necessary to make you possible."
— Jonathan Safran Foer

" Succotash my cocker spaniel, you fudging crevasse-hole dipshiitake!-- Oscar"
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"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 (Everything Is Illuminated)

"I don't think that there are any limits to how excellent we could make life seem."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything Is Illuminated)

"I want an infinitely blank book and the rest of time...
...why didn't I learn to treat everything like it was the last time, my greatest regret is how much I believed in the future.
"
— Jonathan Safran Foer

"I took the world into me, rearranged it, and sent it back out as a question: "Do you like me?""
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

""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 (Everything Is Illuminated)

"Songs are as sad as the listener."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"What about a teakettle? What if the spout opened and closed when the steam came out, so it would become a mouth, and it could whistle pretty melodies, or do Shakespeare, or just
crack up with me? I could invent a teakettle that reads in Dad’s voice, so I could fall asleep, or maybe a set of kettles that sings the chorus of “Yellow Submarine,” which is a song by the Beatles, who I love, because entomology is one of my raisons d’être, which
is a French expression that I know. Another good thing is that I could train my anus to talk when I farted. If I wanted to be extremely hilarious, I’d train it to say, “Wasn’t me!” every time I made an incredibly bad fart. And if I ever made an incredibly bad fart in the Hall of Mirrors, which is in Versailles, which is outside of Paris, which is in France, obviously, my anus would say, “Ce n’étais pas moi!”
What about little microphones? What if everyone swallowed them, and they played the sounds of our hearts through little speakers, which could be in the pouches of our overalls? When you skateboard down the street at night you could hear everyone's heartbeat, and they could hear yours, sort of like sonar. One weird thing is, I wonder if everyone's hearts would start to beat at the same time, like how women who live together have their menstrual periods at the same time, which I know about, but don't really want to know about. That would be so weird, except that the place in the hospital where babies are born would sound like a crystal chandelier in a houseboat, because the babies wouldn't have had time to match up their heartbeats yet. And at the finish line at the end of the New York City Marathon it would sound like war."
— Jonathan Safran Foer

"I like to see people reunited, I like to see people run to each other, I like the kissing and the crying, I like the impatience, the stories that the mouth can't tell fast enough, the ears that aren't big enough, the eyes that can't take in all of the change, I like the hugging, the bringing together, the end of missing someone."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"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 (Everything Is Illuminated)

"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 (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"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 (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"I tried the key in all the doors, even though he said he didn't recognize it. It's not that I didn't trust him, becuase I did. It's that at the end of my search I wanted to be able to say: I don't know how I could have tried harder."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"Does it break my heart, of course, every moment of every day, into more pieces than my heart was made of, I never thought of myself as quiet, much less silent, I never thought about things at all, everything changed, the distance that wedged itself between me and my happiness wasn't the world, it wasn't the bombs and burning buildings, it was me, my thinking, the cancer of never letting go, is ignorance bliss, I don't know, but it's so painful to think, and tell me, what did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever bring me? I think and think and think, I've thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it."
— Jonathan Safran Foer

""The only thing more painful than being an active forgetter is to be an inert rememberer." "
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything Is Illuminated)

"What if I never stop inventing?"
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"You can see the most beautiful things from the observation deck of the Empire State Building. I read somewhere that people on the street are supposed to look like ants, but that's not true. They look like little people. And the cars look like little cars. And even the buildings look little. It's like New York is a miniature replica of New York, which is nice, because you can see what it's really like, instead of how it feels when you're in the middle of it."
— Jonathan Safran Foer

"Everything is to protect you. I exist in case you need to be protected."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything Is Illuminated)

"Humans are the only animal that blushes, laughs, has religion, wages war, and kisses with lips. So in a way, the more you kiss with lips, the more human you are. And the more you wage war."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"I zipped myself all the way into the sleeping bag of myself, not because I was hurt, and not because I had broken something, but because they were cracking up."
— Jonathan Safran Foer

"The end of suffering does not justify the suffering, and so there is no end to suffering."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

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

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

"'I feel too much. That's what's going on.' 'Do you think one can feel too much? Or just feel in the wrong ways?' 'My insides don't match up with my outsides.' 'Do anyone's insides and outsides match up?' 'I don't know. I'm only me.' 'Maybe that's what a person's personality is: the difference between the inside and outside.' 'But it's worse for me.' 'I wonder if everyone thinks it's worse for him.' 'Probably. But it really is worse for me.'"
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"They learned to hate her unknowability, her untouchability, the collage of her."
— 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

"I wish I were a poet. I've never confessed that to anyone, and I'm confessing it to you, because you've given me reason to feel that I can trust you. I've spent my life observing the universe, mostly in my mind's eye. It's been a tremendously rewarding life, a wonderful life. I've been able to explore the origins of time and space with some of the great living thinkers. But I wish I were a poet.
Albert Einstein, a hero of mine, once wrote, 'Our situation is the following. We are standing in front of a closed box which we cannot open.'
I'm sure I don't have to tell you that the vast majority of the universe is composed of dark matter. The fragile balance depends on things we'll never be able to see, hear, smell, taste, or touch. Life itself depends on them. What's real? What isn't real? Maybe those aren't the right questions to be asking. What does life depend on?
I wish I had made things for life to depend on."
— Jonathan Safran Foer

"She brushed her eyelashes against his chest."
— Jonathan Safran Foer

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

"We stopped laughing, I took the world into me, rearranged it, and sent it back out as a question: "Do you like me?""
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"...he enclosed pieces of string that he used to measure out his body--his head, thigh, forearm, finger, neck, everything. He wanted me to sleep with them under my pillow. He said that when he came back, we would remeasure his body against the string as proof that he hadn't changed."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything Is Illuminated)

"'Do you have any coffee?'...'It stunts my growth, and I'm afraid of death.'"
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"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 (Everything Is Illuminated)

"I was of the opinion that the past is past, and like all that is not now it should remain buried along the side of our memories."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything Is Illuminated)

"When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder.
Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calendar that showed the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did. Where the smoke from a chimney ended. How an overturned bottle rested at the edge of a table.
I spent my life learning to feel less.
Every day I felt less.
Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?
You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything Is Illuminated)