Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

by Jonathan Safran Foer

So what about skyscrapers for dead people that were built down? They could be underneath the skyscrapers for living people that are built up.

“Actually, if limousines were extremely long, they wouldn’t need drivers. You could just get in the back seat, walk through the limousine, and then get out of the front seat, which would be where you wanted to go.

“When you look up ‘hilarious’ in the dictionary, there’s a picture of you.”

Mom said, “Honey,” and I said, “Oui,” and she said, “Did you give a copy of our apartment key to the mailman?” I thought it was so weird that she would mention that then, because it didn’t have to do with anything, but I think she was looking for something to talk about that wasn’t the obvious thing.

“But if you don’t tell me anything, how can I ever be right?” He circled something in an article and said, “Another way of looking at it would be, how could you ever be wrong?”

I’ve thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.

instead of singing in the shower I would write out the lyrics of my favorite songs, the ink would turn the water blue or red or green, and the music

If I’d been someone else in a different world I’d’ve done something different, but I was myself, and the world was the world,

She was extending a hand that I didn’t know how to take, so I broke its fingers with my silence,

“It probably gets pretty lonely to be anyone.”

That secret was a hole in the middle of me that every happy thing fell into.

And what about how his hands were so rough and red from all of his sculptures that sometimes I joked to him that it was really the sculptures that were sculpting his hands?

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. Eight minutes thirty-two seconds . . . But I knew that there couldn’t be pockets that enormous. In the end, everyone loses everyone.

Include everything.

I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love.

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.

“I’m God!” “You’re an atheist.” “I don’t exist!” I fell back onto the bed, into his arms, and we cracked up together.

“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.”

As it was coming out of my mouth, I wished it was going into my mouth.

I don’t know how she knew when I’d be there. Maybe she just waited around all day.

I like to see people reunited, maybe that’s a silly thing, but what can I say, 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,

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.

literature was the only religion her father practiced, when a book fell on the floor he kissed it,

“Promise me you’ll take care,” she said, pulling the hood of my coat over my head, “Promise me you’ll take extra-special care. I know you look both ways before you cross the street, but I want you to look both ways a second time, because I told you to.”

it’s a shame that we have to live, but it’s a tragedy that we get to live only one life, because if I’d had two lives, I would have spent one of them with her.

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!”

“There are more places you haven’t heard of than you’ve heard of!”

It was getting hard to keep all the things I didn’t know inside me.

“I’ve lived long enough to know I’m not one-hundred-percent anything!”

“Sure! You could write a book about Manuel Escobar! And that would leave things out, too! You could write ten books! You could never stop writing!”

What if the water that came out of the shower was treated with a chemical that responded to a combination of things, like your heartbeat, and your body temperature, and your brain waves, so that your skin changed color according to your mood? If you were extremely excited your skin would turn green, and if you were angry you’d turn red, obviously, and if you felt like shiitake you’d turn brown, and if you were blue you’d turn blue. Everyone could know what everyone else felt, and we could be more careful with each other, because you’d never want to tell a person whose skin was purple that you’re angry at her for being late, just like you would want to pat a pink person on the back and tell him, “Congratulations!”

“Dad had a spirit,” she said, like she was rewinding a bit in our conversation. I told her, “He had cells, and now they’re on rooftops, and in the river, and in the lungs of millions of people around New York, who breathe him every time they speak!”

“Why can’t you remember him and be happy?”

I miss you already, Oskar. 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.

It felt like making love.

It’s a shame that we have to live, but it’s a tragedy that we get to live only one life.

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.

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

Why are you leaving me? He wrote, I do not know how to live. I do not know either, but I am trying. I do not know how to try.

So I buried them, and let them hurt me.

That did not make my father a liar. It made him my father.

regret that it takes a life to learn how to live, Oskar. Because if I were able to live my life again, I would do things differently.

Even though I knew that there were 161,999,999 locks in New York that it didn’t open, I still felt like it opened everything.

Friday was also boring, except that it was Friday, which meant it was almost Saturday, which meant I was that much closer to the lock, which was happiness.

They had more and more to tell each other, and less and less string.

Of course, he never could open the can, because then he would lose its contents. It was enough just to know it was there.

“Well, it’s hard for anyone, even the most pessimistic of pessimists, to spend more than a few minutes in Central Park without feeling that he or she is experiencing some tense in addition to the present, right?” “I guess.” “Maybe we’re just missing things we’ve lost, or hoping for what we want to come. Or maybe it’s the residue of the dreams from that night the park was moved. Maybe we miss what those children had lost, and hope for what they hoped for.”

On the ground are the crystals of the frozen first breaths of babies, and those of the last gasps of the dying.

Forty years of loving someone becomes staples and tape.

and how until I found it, I didn’t love Dad enough. “What is it about this building?” Mr. Black asked. She said, “If I had an answer, it wouldn’t really be love, would it?”