Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

by Jonathan Safran Foer

“Yellow Submarine,” which is a song by the Beatles, who I love, because entomology is one of my raisons d’être, which is a French expression that I know.

“I want to know everything,” I told him, but that isn’t true anymore either.

She could tell that I was zipping up the sleeping bag of myself, and I could tell that she didn’t really love me.

Parents are always more knowledgeable than their children, and children are always smarter than their parents.”

“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 could connect them to make almost anything I wanted, which meant I wasn’t getting closer to anything.

One thing that was so great was how he could find a mistake in every single article we looked at.

“Well, what I don’t get is why do we exist? I don’t mean how, but why.” I watched the fireflies of his thoughts orbit his head.

Just because you’re an atheist, that doesn’t mean you wouldn’t love for things to have reasons for why they are.

the meaning of my thoughts started to float away from me, like leaves that fall from a tree into a river, I was the tree, the world was the river.

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 wanted to pull the thread, unravel the scarf of my silence and start again from the beginning,

we were determined to ignore whatever needed to be ignored, to build a new world from nothing if nothing in our world could be salvaged,

I could have released sculptures, I could have released myself from the marble of myself. I’d experienced joy, but not nearly enough, could there be enough?

I asked her if she was in love with Ron. She said, “Ron is a great person,” which was an answer to a question I didn’t ask.

I’d get that feeling like I was in the middle of a huge black ocean, or in deep space, but not in the fascinating way. It’s just that everything was incredibly far away from me.

“Why do beautiful songs make you sad?” “Because they aren’t true.” “Never?” “Nothing is beautiful and true.”

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

I thought about birds. Could they fly if there wasn’t someone, somewhere, laughing?

I have no need for the past, I thought, like a child. I did not consider that the past might have a need for me.

His attention filled the hole in the middle of me.

“I’m being annoying,” I said. “You’re not being annoying,” she said, but it’s extremely hard to believe someone when they tell you that.

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

So here’s my question: What were we spending so much time doing if not getting to know each other?

I always think about how I could have told her the truth then. It wasn’t too late to turn around, before I got to the place I couldn’t come back from.

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,

I observe, I write, I try not to remember the life that I didn’t want to lose but lost and have to remember, being here fills my heart with so much joy, even if the joy isn’t mine,

in the morning the Nothing vase cast a Something shadow, like the memory of someone you’ve lost,

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

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,

I had to go home, I hated myself for going, why couldn’t I be the kind of person who stays?

I wanted to call her name, but I didn’t want her to hear my voice,

when you hide your face from the world, you can’t see the world,

“That’s not true,” I said, not knowing what the next words out of my mouth would be, but wanting them to be mine, wanting, more than I’d ever wanted anything, to express the center of me and be understood.

everything being, for once, better than it was and as good as it could be, everything full of meaning,

maybe great books were coiled within him like springs,

I knew what to do, it was exactly as it had been in my dreams, as if all the information had been coiled within me like a spring, everything that was happening had happened before and would happen again,

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,

You have to keep the door open so they can come in! But it also means you have to let them go!”

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

I asked if he was one-hundred-percent sure. He said, “I’ve lived long enough to know I’m not one-hundred-percent anything!”

I tried to think of some way to be hilarious, because I thought that maybe if I was hilarious, she wouldn’t be mad at me anymore and I could be safe again.

That’s been my problem. I miss what I already have, and I surround myself with things that are missing.

I never confused what I had with what I was.

But there was always work to be done. We spent our lives making livings.

Sometimes I would ask him for something that I did not even want, just to let him get it for me. We spent our days trying to help each other help each other.

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.

When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me.

I spent my life learning to feel less. Every day I felt less.