Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

by Jonathan Safran Foer

because entomology is one of my raisons d’être,

Another good thing is that I could train my anus to talk when I farted.

When you skateboarded down the street at night you could hear everyone’s heartbeat, and they could hear yours, sort of like sonar.

Mom thought it would be good for me to have a physical activity besides tambourining,

Isn’t it so weird how the number of dead people is increasing even though the earth stays the same size, so that one day there isn’t going to be room to bury anyone anymore?

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

He shrugged his shoulders, like he had no idea what I was talking about. I loved that.

Being with him made my brain quiet. I didn’t have to invent a thing.

we laughed and laughed, together and separately, out loud and silently, 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, it was one of the best days of my life, a day during which I lived my life and didn’t think about my life at all.

Later that year, when snow started to hide the front steps,

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, so I was silent,

I’d experienced joy, but not nearly enough, could there be enough?

GOODBYE! I LOVE YOU! GOODBYE! I LOVE YOU!

“I hope you never love anything as much as I love you.

We need much bigger pockets, I thought as I lay in bed, counting off the seven minutes that it takes a normal person to fall asleep. 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.

In the end, everyone loses everyone. There was no invention to get around that, and so I felt, that night, like the turtle that everything else in the universe was on top of.

I woke up once in the middle of the night, and Buckminster’s paws were on my eyelids. He must have been feeling my nightmares.

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

Our laughter kept the feathers in the air. I thought about birds. Could they fly if there wasn’t someone, somewhere, laughing?

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

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.

That night I told her what I had seen. She made me promise never to speak a word about it. I promised her. She said, Why should I believe you? I wanted to tell her, Because what I saw would no longer be mine if I talked about it.

She laughed enough to migrate an entire flock of birds.

I want to be a sculptor, and I want to marry your sister. Those are my only dreams. I could write more, but that is all that matters.

I did not need to tell him my story, but I needed to listen to his. I wanted to protect him, which I was sure I could do, even if I could not protect myself.

We had everything to say to each other, but no ways to say it.

All that mattered was him looking at me. I was prepared to fall apart if it came to that.

I did not need to know if he could love me. I needed to know if he could need me.

Even if it was relatively insignificant, it was something, and I needed to do something,

I shook my tambourine the whole time, because it helped me remember that even though I was going through different neighborhoods, I was still me.

I knocked again. I was willing to be annoying if that’s what was necessary.

“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.”

Grandma believes in God, but she doesn’t believe in taxis, so I bled on my shirt on the bus.

I liked the way it felt to have someone look for me, to hear my name again and again.

Also I designed a pretty fascinating bracelet, where you put a rubber band around your favorite book of poems for a year, and then you take it off and wear it.

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,

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

I can only hold on to the things I want to lose,

we looked at each other until it felt like everything would burst into flames,

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.

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

couldn’t stop thinking about her even though I hardly knew her, I didn’t know what good would come of going to see her, but I knew that I needed to be near her,

“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.

We stopped laughing, I took the world into me, rearranged it, and sent it back out as a question: “Do you like me?”

we shared the smile of recognizing ourselves in each other,

I remembered the feeling she was feeling, the exhilaration of building the world anew, I heard from behind the door the sounds of creation, the letters pressing into the paper, the pages being pulled from the machine, everything being, for once, better than it was and as good as it could be, everything full of meaning,

maybe he would have been important if he had lived longer,

his voice was handsome and broken, like a cobblestone street,

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,