Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close Quotes

“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

“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

“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 regret that it takes a life to learn how to live.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“So many people enter and leave your life! Hundreds of thousands of people! You have to keep the door open so they can come in! But it also means you have to let them go!”
― 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

“Songs are as sad as the listener.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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 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

“My life story is the story of everyone I've ever met.”
― 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, that night, on that stage, under that skull, incredibly close to everything in the universe, but also extremely alone. I wondered, for the first time in my life, if life was worth all the work it took to live. What exactly made it worth it? What's so horrible about being dead forever, and not feeling anything, and not even dreaming? What's so great about feeling and dreaming?”
― 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

“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, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“We had everything to say to each other, but no ways to say it”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“The secret was a hole in the middle of me that every happy thing fell into.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“Succotash my cocker spaniel, you fudging crevasse-hole dipshiitake!”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“I missed you even when I was with you. That’s been my problem. I miss what I already have, and I surround myself with things that are missing.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“I wanted to touch him, to tell him that even if everyone left everyone, I would never leave him, he talked and talked, his words fell through him, trying to find the floor to his sadness....”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“In the end, everyone loses everyone. There was no invention to get around that, and so I felt, that night, like the turtle that everything else in the universe was on top of.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“I thought about all of the things that everyone ever says to each other, and how everyone is going to die, whether it's in a millisecond, or days, or months, or 76.5 years, if you were just born. Everything that's born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they're all on fire, and we're all trapped.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“Why didn't he say goodbye?
I gave myself a bruise.
Why didn't he say 'I love you'?”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“I hated myself for going, why couldn't I be the kind of person who stays?”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“Mom told me, “It probably gets pretty lonely to be Grandma, don’t you think?” I told her, “It probably gets pretty lonely to be anyone”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“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

“But I still couldn't figure out what it all meant. The more I found out, the less I understood.”
― 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

“I did not need to know if he could love me.
I needed to know if he could need me.”
― 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

“She laughed enough to migrate an entire flock of birds. That was how she said yes”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“Every moment before this one depends on this one.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“...because he had been waiting for someone to come back to him, so every time someone knocked on the door, he couldn't stop himself from hoping it might be that person, even though he knew he shouldn't hope.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“I started inventing things, and then I couldn't stop, like beavers, which I know about. People think they cut down trees so they can build dams, but in reality it's because their teeth never stop growing, and if they didn't constantly file them down by cutting through all of those trees, their teeth would start to grow into their own faces, which would kill them. That's how my brain was.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“I wanted to tell her everything, maybe if I'd been able to, we could have lived differently, maybe I'd be there with you now instead of here. Maybe... if I'd said, 'I'm so afraid of losing something I love that I refuse to love anything,' maybe that would have made the impossible possible. Maybe, but I couldn't do it, I had buried too much too deeply inside me. And here I am, instead of there.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“We were quiet on the car ride home. I turned on the radio and found a station playing "Hey Jude." It was true, I didn't want to make it bad. I wanted to take the sad song and make it better. It's just that I didn't know how.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“Why I'm Not Where You Are”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“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

“You can't love anything more than something you miss.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“...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, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“Do you have any coffee?'...'It stunts my growth, and I'm afraid of death.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“Even if I don't like what I am, I know what I am. My children like what they are, but they don't know what they are. So tell me which is worse.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close