"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

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

"You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness."
— Jonathan Safran Foer

"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)

"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 skateboarded 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 (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"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

"It's the tragedy of loving, you can't love anything more than something you miss."
— Jonathan Safran Foer

"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

"Even now, all possible feelings do not yet exist, there are still those that lie beyond our capacity and our imagination. From time to time, when a piece of music no one has ever written or a painting no one has ever painted, or something else impossible to predict, fathom or yet describe takes place, a new feeling enters the world. And then, for the millionth time in the history of feeling, the heart surges and absorbs the impact."
— Nicole Krauss (The History of Love)

"'If I had a camera,' I said, 'I'd take a picture of you every day. That way I'd remember how you looked every single day of your life.'"
— Nicole Krauss

"She was gone, and all that was left was the space you'd grown around her, like a tree that grows around a fence. For a long time, it remained hollow. Years, maybe. And when at last it was filled again, you knew that the new love you felt for a woman would have been impossible without Alma. If it weren't for her, there would never have been an empty space, or the need to fill it."
— Nicole Krauss (The History of Love)

"I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best."
— Marilyn Monroe

"The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference."
— Elie Wiesel

"If you judge people, you have no time to love them."
— Mother Teresa

"Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage."
— Laozi

"So, this is my life. And I want you to know that I am both happy and sad and I'm still trying to figure out how that could be."
— Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)

"And in that moment, I swear we were infinite."
— Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)

"...we accept the love we think we deserve."
— Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)

"I am very interested and fascinated how everyone loves each other, but no one really likes each other."
— Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)

"Enjoy it. Because it's happening."
— Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)

"It's just that I don't want to be somebody's crush. If somebody likes me, I want them to like the real me, not what they think I am. And I don't want them to carry it around inside. I want them to show me, so I can feel it too."
— Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)

"It was the kind of kiss that made
me know that I was never so happy in my whole life."
— Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)

"There's nothing like deep breaths after laughing that hard. Nothing in the world like a sore stomach for the right reasons."
— Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)

"And I guess I realized at that moment that I really did love her. Because there was nothing to gain, and that didn't matter."
— Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)

""Do you always think this much, Charlie?" "Is that bad?" "Not necessarily. It's just that sometimes people use thought to not participate in life." "Is that bad?" "Yes.""
— Stephen Chbosky

"I think the idea is that every person has to live for his or her own life and then make the choice to share it with other people. Maybe that is what makes people "participate.""
— Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)

"I guess we are who we are for a lot of reasons. And maybe we'll never know most of them. But even if we don't have the power to choose where we come from, we can still choose where we go from there.
"
— Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)

"Personally, I like to think my brother is having a college experience like they do in the movies. I don't mean the big fraternity party kind of movie. More like the movie where the guy meets a smart girl who wears a lot of sweaters and drinks cocoa. They talk about books and issues and kiss in the rain. I think something like that would be very good for him, especially if the girl were unconventionally beautiful. They are the best kind of girls, I think. I personally find 'super models' strange. I don't know why this is."
— Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)

"You don't have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body."
— C.S. Lewis

"I'm sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect."
— J.D. Salinger

"Almost every time somebody gives me a present, it ends up making me sad."
— J.D. Salinger

"I used to think she was quite intelligent , in my stupidity. The reason I did was because she knew quite a lot about the theater and plays and literature and all that stuff. If somebody knows quite a lot about all those things, it takes you quite a while to find out whether they're really stupid or not."
— J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)

"It's a funny thing about girls. Every time you mention some guy that's strictly a bastard-very mean, or very conceited and all-and when you mention it to the girl, she'll tell you he has an inferiority complex. Maybe he has, but that still doesn't keep him from being a bastard, in my opinion."
— J.D. Salinger

"The most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid."
— J.D. Salinger (Nine Stories)

"I don't exactly know what I mean by that, but I mean it."
— J.D. Salinger

"...there are two types of people in the world: those who prefer to be sad among others, and those who prefer to be sad alone."
— Nicole Krauss (The History of Love)

"Maybe the first time you saw her you were ten. She was standing in the sun scratching her legs. Or tracing letters in the dirt with a stick. Her hair was being pulled. Or she was pulling someone's hair. And a part of you was drawn to her, and a part of you resisted--wanting to ride off on your bicycle, kick a stone, remain uncomplicated. In the same breath you felt the strength of a man, and a self-pity that made you feel small and hurt. Part of you thought: Please don't look at me. If you don't, I can still turn away. And part of you thought: Look at me."
— Nicole Krauss (The History of Love)

"And if the man who once upon a time had been a boy who promised he'd never fall in love with another girl as long as he lived kept his promise, it wasn't because he was stubborn or even loyal. He couldn't help it."
— Nicole Krauss (The History of Love)

"If at large gatherings or parties, or around people with whom you feel distant, your hands sometimes hang awkwardly at the ends of your arms-- if you find yourself at a loss for what do with them, overcome with sadness that comes when you recognize the foreignness of your own body-- it's because your hands remember a time when the division between mind and body, brain and heart, what's inside and what's outside, was so much less. It's not that we've forgotten the language of gestures entirely. The habit of moving our hands while we speak is left over from it. Clapping, pointing, giving the thumbs-up: all artifacts of ancient gestures. Holding hands, for example, is a way to remember how it feels to say nothing together. And at night, when it's too dark to see, we find it necessary to gesture on each other's bodies to make ourselves understood."
— Nicole Krauss (The History of Love)

"Then he almost but didn't say the two sentence he'd been meaning to say for years: part of me is made of glass, and also, I love you"
— Nicole Krauss

"When I got older I decided I wanted ot be a real writer. I tried to write about real things. I wanted to describe the world, because to live in an undescribed world was too lonely."
— Nicole Krauss (The History of Love)

"Wittgenstein once wrote that when the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it. I wish I could draw you."
— Nicole Krauss (The History of Love)

"He wondered if what he had taken for the richness of silence was really the poverty of never being heard [...]. How could he have forgotten what he had always known: there is no match for the silence of God."
— Nicole Krauss (The History of Love)

"ONE THING I AM NEVER GOING TO DO WHEN I GROW UP
Is fall in love, drop out of college, learn to subsist on water and air, have a species named after me, and ruin my life."
— Nicole Krauss (The History of Love)

"Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering."
— Nicole Krauss (The History of Love)

"...An average of seventy-four species become extinct every day, which was one good reason but no the only one to hold someone's hand..."
— Nicole Krauss (The History of Love)

"After that day when I saw the elephant, I let myself see more and believe more. It was a game I played with myself. When I told Alma the things I saw she would laugh and tell me she loved my imagination. For her I changed pebbles into diamonds, shoes into mirrors, I changed glass into water, I gave her wings and pulled birds from her ears and in her pockets she found the feathers, I asked a pear to become a pineapple, a pineapple to become a lightbulb, a lightbulb to become the moon, and the moon to become a coin I flipped for her love, both sides were heads: I knew I couldn't lose."
— Nicole Krauss (The History of Love)

"During the Age of Glass, everyone believed some part of him or her to be extremely fragile. For some it was a hand, for others a femur, yet others believed it was their noses that were made of glass. The Age of Glass followed the Stone Age as an evolutionary corrective, introducing into human relations a new sense of fragility that fostered compassion. This period lasted a relatively short time in the history of love-about a century-until a doctor named Ignacio da Silva hit on the treatment of inviting people to recline on a couch and giving them a bracing smack on the body part in question, proving to them the truth. The anatomical illusion that had seemed so real slowly disappeared and-like so much we no longer need but can't give up-became vestigial. But from time to time, for reasons that can't always be understood, it surfaces again, suggesting that the Age of Glass, like the Age of Silence, never entirely ended."
— Nicole Krauss (The History of Love)

""What about you? Are you happiest and saddest right now that you've ever been?" "Of course I am." "Why?" "Because nothing makes me happier and nothing makes me sadder than you.""
— Nicole Krauss (The History of Love)

"Why does one begin to write? Because she feels misunderstood, I guess. Because it never comes out clearly enough when she tries to speak. Because she wants to rephrase the world, to take it in and give it back again differently, so that everything is used and nothing is lost. Because it's something to do to pass the time until she is old enough to experience the things she writes about."
— Nicole Krauss