"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)

"There were things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him. So I buried them, and let them hurt me."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"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)

""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)

"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

"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)

"You must always look with both of your eyes and listen with both of your ears. He says this is a very big world and there are many many things you could miss if you are not careful. There are remarkable things all the time, right in front of us, but our eyes have like the clouds over the sun and our lives are paler and poorer if we do not see them for what they are. If nobody speaks of remarkable things, how can they be called remarkable?"
— Jon McGregor (If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things)

"If you listen, you can hear it.
The city, it sings.
If you stand quietly, at the foot of a garden, in the middle of the street, on the roof of a house.
It's clearest at night, when the sound cuts more sharply across the surface of things, when the song reaches out to a place inside you.
It's a wordless song, for the most, but it's a song all the same, and nobody hearing it could doubt what it sings. And the song sings the loudest when you pick out each note."
— Jon McGregor (If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things)

"HAPPINESS [is] ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED"
— Jon Krakauer (Into the Wild)

"When you forgive, you love. And when you love, God’s light shines upon you.

-- Ron Franz"
— Jon Krakauer (Into the Wild)

"I read somewhere... how important it is in life not necessarily to be strong, but to feel strong... to measure yourself at least once."
— Jon Krakauer (Into the Wild)