"You get a strange feeling when you're about to leave a place, I told him, like you'll not only miss the people you love but you'll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you'll never be this way ever again."
— Azar Nafisi (Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books)

"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 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

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

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

"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

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

"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 (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

"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)

"Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does."
— Jonathan Safran Foer

"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

"If we communicated with something like music, we would never be misunderstood, because there is nothing in music to understand...... But until we find this new way of speaking, until we can find a nonapproximate vocabulary, nonsense words are the best thing we've got. Ifactifice is one such word."
— 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)

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

"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)

"we burned with love for ourselves, all of us, starters of the fire we suffered- our love was the affliction for which only our love was the cure"
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything Is Illuminated)

"Why I'm Not Where You Are"
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"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

""Memory was supposed to fill the time, but it made time a hole to be filled. Each second was two hundred yards, to be walked, crawled. You couldn't see the next hour, it was so far in the distance. Tomorrow was over the horizon, and would take an entire day to reach.""
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything Is Illuminated)

"I believe that when people die, they go to the same place as all the people who haven’t yet been born. That’s why it’s called the world to come, because that’s where they make the new souls for the future. And the reward when good people die” – her mother paused, swallowed, paused again – “the reward when good people die is that they get to help make the people in their families who haven’t been born yet. They pick out what kinds of traits they want the new people to have – they give them all the raw material of their souls, like their talents and their brains and their potential. Of course it’s up to the new ones, once they’re born, what they’ll use and what they won’t, but that’s what everyone who dies is doing, I think. They get to decide what kind of people the new ones might be able to become."
— Dara Horn (The World to Come: A Novel)

"Still though, I think if you're not self-obsessed, you're probably boring."
— Dave Eggers

"We are unusual and tragic and alive."
— Dave Eggers

"It is no way to live, to wait to love."
— Dave Eggers

"All I ever wanted was to know what to do."
— Dave Eggers (You Shall Know Our Velocity!)

"You invite things to happen. You open the door. You inhale. And if you inhale the chaos, you give the chaos, the chaos gives back."
— Dave Eggers (You Shall Know Our Velocity!)

"There's nothing to be gained from passive observance, the simple documenting of conditions, because, at its core, it sets a bad example. Every time something is observed and not fixed, or when one has a chance to give in some way and does not, there is a lie being told, the same lie we all know by heart but which needn't be reiterated.”"
— Dave Eggers

"The only infallible truth of our lives is that everything we love in life will be taken from us."
— Dave Eggers

"[...] the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!' What did they call such young people in Goethe's Germany?"
— Jack Kerouac (On the Road)

"I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till i drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion."
— Jack Kerouac

"Live, travel, adventure, bless, and don't be sorry."
— Jack Kerouac

"Happiness consists in realizing it is all a great strange dream"
— Jack Kerouac

"What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing?- it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-by. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies."
— Jack Kerouac (On the Road)

"Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square hole. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do."
— Apple Computer Inc.

"Life must be rich and full of loving--it's no good otherwise, no good at all, for anyone."
— Jack Kerouac (Kerouac: Selected Letters: Volume 1 1940-1956)

"My witness is the empty sky."
— Jack Kerouac

"We turned at a dozen paces, for love is a duel, and looked at each other for the last time."
— Jack Kerouac

"he saw that all the struggles of life were incessant, laborious, painful, that nothing was done quickly, without labor, that it had to undergo a thousand fondlings, revisings, moldings, addings, removings, graftings, tearings, correctings, smoothings, rebuildings, reconsiderings, nailings, tackings, chippings, hammerings, hoistings, connectings — all the poor fumbling uncertain incompletions of human endeavor. They went on forever and were forever incomplete, far from perfect, refined, or smooth, full of terrible memories of failure and fears of failure, yet, in the way of things, somehow noble, complete, and shining in the end."
— Jack Kerouac

"the road is life"
— Jack Kerouac