"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)

"... I'm so afraid of losing something I love that I refuse to love anything"
— 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 got tired, I told him. Not worn out, but worn through. Like one of those wives who wakes up one morning and says I can't bake any more bread.
You never bake bread, he wrote, and we were still joking.
Then it's like I woke up and baked bread, I said, and we were joking even then. I wondered will there come a time when we won't be joking? And what would it look like? And how would that feel?
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 calender that showed the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did. Where the smoke from the 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

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

"'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)

"In bed that night I invented a special drain that would be underneath every pillow in New York, and would connect to the reservoir. Whenever people cried themselves to sleep, the tears would all go to the same place, and in the morning the weatherman could report if the water level of the Reservoir of Tears had gone up or down, and you could know if New York is in heavy boots."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

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

"'Why do beautiful songs make you sad?' 'Because they aren't true.' 'Never?' 'Nothing is beautiful and true.'"
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"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 (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"Feathers filled the small room. Our laughter kept the feathers in the air. I thought about birds. Could they fly is there wasn't someone, somewhere, laughing?"
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"I never confused what I had with what I was."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"I felt suddenly shy. I was not used to shy. I was used to shame. 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 (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"I think it's very pretty.
Can it be pretty if no one thinks it's pretty?
I think it's pretty.
If you're the only one?
That's pretty pretty.
And what about the boys? Don't you want them to think you're pretty?
I wouldn't want a boy to think I was pretty unless he was the kind of boy who thought I was pretty."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything Is Illuminated)

"She was a genius of sadness, immersing herself in it, separating its numerous strands, appreciating its subtle nuances. She was a prism through which sadness could be divided into its infinite spectrum."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything Is Illuminated: A Novel)

"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

"Those were the Rommely women: Mary, the mother, Evy, Sissy, and Katie, her daughters, and Francie, who would grow up to be a Rommely woman even though her name was Nolan. They were all slender, frail creatures with wondering eyes and soft fluttery voices. But they were made out of thin invisible steel."
— Betty Smith

"We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be."
— May Sarton

"The covers of this book are too far apart."
— Ambrose Bierce

"Alice laughed. 'There's no use trying,' she said. 'One can't believe impossible things.'

'I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. There goes the shawl again!'"
— Lewis Carroll

"The capacity for friendship is God's way of apologizing for our families."
— Jay McInerney (The Last of the Savages)

"Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?"
— George Carlin

"I must have a prodigious amount of mind; it takes me as much as a week, sometimes, to make it up!"
— Mark Twain

"In real life, I assure you, there is no such thing as algebra. "
— Fran Lebowitz

"I didn't fail the test, I just found 100 ways to do it wrong."
— Benjamin Franklin

""So this is it. We're going to die."
"Yes...except...No! Wait a minute, what's this switch?"
"What? Where?"
"No, I was only fooling. We are going to die after all." "
— Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy 1)

"Nothing's a better cure for writer's block than to eat ice cream right out of the carton."
— Don Roff

"There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating: people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing."
— Oscar Wilde

""I love to sleep. Do you? Isn't it great? It really is the best of both worlds. You get to be alive and unconscious."
"
— Rita Rudner

"I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything."
— Steven Wright

"If you are a student you should always get a good nights sleep unless you have come to the good part of your book, and then you should stay up all night and let your schoolwork fall by the wayside, a phrase which means 'flunk'."
— Lemony Snicket

"I wish, when I was first born, the first thing I said was "Quote" so the last thing I said before I died would be "Unquote."
— Steven Wright

"The best kind of friend is the kind you sit with, never say a word and walk away feeling like it was the best conversation you ever had.
"
— Steven Wright

"Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away."
— Maya Angelou

"Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened."
— Dr. Seuss

"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on."
— Robert Frost

"There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle."
— Albert Einstein

"It is better to be hated for what you are than loved for what you are not."
— André Gide

"I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next.
Delicious Ambiguity."
— Gilda Radner

"A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing."
— George Bernard Shaw

"Religion has convinced people that there's an invisible man ... living in the sky. Who watches everything you do every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a list of ten specific things he doesn't want you to do. And if you do any of these things, he will send you to a special place, of burning and fire and smoke and torture and anguish for you to live forever, and suffer, and suffer, and burn, and scream, until the end of time. But he loves you. He loves you. He loves you and he needs money."
— George Carlin

"A learning experience is one of those things that says, "You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.""
— Douglas Adams (The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time)

"The best index to a person's character is how he treats people who can't do him any good, and how he treats people who can't fight back."
— Abigail Van Buren

"A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving."
— Laozi

"I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited."
— Sylvia Plath

"You know what's weird? Day by day, nothing seems to change, but pretty soon...everything's different."
— Bill Watterson

"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom."
— Martin Luther King Jr.

"Sometimes the right thing feels all wrong until it is over and done with."
— Alice Hoffman (Practical Magic)

"That was the thing. You never got used to it, the idea of someone being gone. Just when you think it's reconciled, accepted, someone points it out to you, and it just hits you all over again, that shocking."
— Sarah Dessen (The Truth About Forever)

"Did you know that for pretty much the entire history of the human species, the average life span was less than thirty years? You could count on ten years or so of real adulthood, right? There was no planning for retirement, There was no planning for a career. There was no planning. No time for plannning. No time for a future. But then the life spans started getting longer, and people started having more and more future. And now life has become the future. Every moment of your life is lived for the future--you go to high school so you can go to college so you can get a good job so you can get a nice house so you can afford to send your kids to college so they can get a good job so they can get a nice house so they can afford to send their kids to college."
— John Green (Paper Towns)