Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

by 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.

“I changed the course of human history!” “That’s right.” “I changed the universe!” “You did.” “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.

What were we spending so much time doing if not getting to know each other?

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

I said, “That’s hilarious,” because it must have been for him to crack up so much.

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!

“How much do you cry?” “How much?” “A spoonful? A cup? A bathtub? If you added it up.”

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

Anyone who believes that a second is faster than a decade did not live my life.

The room was filled with conversations we weren’t having.”

it broke my heart into more pieces than my heart was made of, why can’t people say what they mean at the time?

Young sisters in a bed under the roof of their childhood home. Wind on the window. How could anything less deserve to be destroyed? I thought we would be awake all night. Awake for the rest of our lives.

I said, I want to tell you something. She said, You can tell me tomorrow. I had never told her how much I loved her. She was my sister. We slept in the same bed. There was never a right time to say it. It was always unnecessary.