Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

by Jonathan Safran Foer

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

I am the one who broke the rule. But I am the one who made the rule you couldn’t live with.

My thoughts are going up the sleeve of my father’s overcoat. His arm was so thick and strong. I was sure it would protect me for as long as I lived. And it did. Even after I lost him.

There were things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him. So I buried them, and let them hurt me.

I left the unfinished letter on my desk. The paper helped our house burn.

I wanted to take the sad song and make it better. It’s just that I didn’t know how.

“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?”

The gavels of frozen judges are frozen between guilt and innocence.

I hope you never think about anything as much as I think about you.

I wondered where he was at that moment. I didn’t know if I wanted him to be suffering.

When I no longer had to be strong in front of you, I became very weak. I brought myself to the ground, which was where I belonged.

It was as simple as wanting to take his place. And it was more complicated than that.

When I looked at you, my life made sense. Even the bad things made sense. They were necessary to make you possible.

I thought he had to look for what he was looking for, and realize it no longer existed, or never existed.

I tried to invent optimistic inventions. But the pessimistic ones were extremely loud.

I couldn’t tell what he was feeling, because I couldn’t speak the language of his feelings.

I looked at everyone and wondered where they came from, and who they missed, and what they were sorry for.

And then a thought came into my brain that wasn’t like the other thoughts. It was closer to me, and louder. I didn’t know where it came from, or what it meant, or if I loved it or hated it.

he was trying to find you, just as you’d tried to find me, it broke my heart into more pieces than my heart was made of, why can’t people say what they mean at the time?

I didn’t want to hear about death. It was all anyone talked about, even when no one was actually talking about it.

What’s real? What isn’t real? Maybe those aren’t the right questions to be asking. What does life depend on?

I tried to notice everything, because I wanted to be able to remember it perfectly. I’ve forgotten everything important in my life.

The mistakes I’ve made are dead to me. But I can’t take back the things I never did.

In my dream, people apologized for things that were about to happen, and lit candles by inhaling.

At the end of my dream, Eve put the apple back on the branch. The tree went back into the ground. It became a sapling, which became a seed.