Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

by Jonathan Safran Foer

I zipped myself all the way into the sleeping bag of myself,

sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all of the lives I’m not living.

He was an intellectual, although he wasn’t important, maybe he would have been important if he had lived longer, maybe great books were coiled within him like springs, books that could have separated inside from outside.

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,

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!”

“A bullet’s a bullet’s a bullet!” he said. “But isn’t a rock a rock?” I asked. He said, “Of course not!” I thought I understood him, but I wasn’t positive, so I pointed at the roses in the vase on the table. “Is a rose a rose?” “No! A rose is not a rose is not a rose!” And then for some reason I started thinking about “Something in the Way She Moves,” so I asked, “Is a love song a love song?” He said, “Yes!” I thought for a second. “Is love love?” He said, “No!”

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!” Another reason it would be a good invention is that there are so many times when you know you’re feeling a lot of something, but you don’t know what the something is. Am I frustrated? Am I actually just panicky? And that confusion changes your mood, it becomes your mood, and you become a confused, gray person. But with the special water, you could look at your orange hands and think, I’m happy! That whole time I was actually happy! What a relief!

“Dad didn’t have a spirit! He had cells!” “His memory is there.” “His memory is here,” I said, pointing at my head. “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!”

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.

I 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. I would change my life.

“My insides don’t match up with my out-sides.” “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.”

“I’m gonna bury my feelings deep inside me.” “What do you mean, bury your feelings?” “No matter how much I feel, I’m not going to let it out. If I have to cry, I’m gonna cry on the inside. If I have to bleed, I’ll bruise. If my heart starts going crazy, I’m not gonna tell everyone in the world about it. It doesn’t help anything. It just makes everyone’s life worse.”

“But if you’re burying your feelings deep inside you, you won’t really be you, will you?”

Every moment before this one depends on this one.

I told Mr. Black that I was panicky, and he said it was OK to be panicky. I told him I felt like I couldn’t do it, and he said it was OK to feel like I couldn’t do it. I told him it was the thing that I was most afraid of. He said he could understand why. I wanted him to disagree with me, but he wouldn’t, so I had no way to argue. I told him I would wait for him in the lobby, and he said, “Fine.” “OK, OK,” I said, “I’ll go.”

The night before I lost everything was like any other night.