Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

by Jonathan Safran Foer

in the end I was the clay and she was the sculptor, I thought, it’s a shame that we have to live, but it’s a tragedy that we get to live only one life, because if I’d had two lives, I would have spent one of them with her.

I’m telling you all of this because I’ll never be your father, and you will always be my child.

I wondered, for the first time in my life, if life was worth all the work it took to live. What exactly made it worth it? What’s so horrible about being dead forever, and not feeling anything, and not even dreaming? What’s so great about feeling and dreaming?

I knew that we were sharing something with our eyes, but I didn’t know what, and I didn’t know if it mattered.

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!”

He told me, “There are more places you haven’t heard of than you’ve heard of!” I loved that.

I was impressed by how much life Mr. Black had lived, and how much he wanted to have his life around him.

It’s not that I didn’t trust him, because I did. It’s that at the end of my search I wanted to be able to say: I don’t know how I could have tried harder.

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?

I missed you even when I was with you. 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.

I would have done anything for him. Maybe that was my sickness.

I realized that I could compromise my life, but not life after me.

It was the first time I had ever cried in front of him. It felt like making love.

It’s a shame that we have to live, but it’s a tragedy that we get to live only one life.

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.

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

I did not feel that he owed it to me. And I did not feel that I owed it to him. We owed it to each other, which is something different.

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

Touching him was always so important to me. It was something I lived for. I never could explain why. Little, nothing touches.

The outsides of our thighs touching as we squeezed together on the bus. I couldn’t explain it, but I needed it.

My thoughts are going to my childhood, Oskar. To when I was a girl. I am sitting here thinking about fistfuls of pebbles, and the first time I noticed hairs under my arms.

I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live,

I opened the windows, even though there was no glass.

“The boy covered his can with a lid, removed it from the string, and put her love for him on a shelf in his closet. Of course, he never could open the can, because then he would lose its contents. It was enough just to know it was there.

Maybe we miss what those children had lost, and hope for what they hoped for.”

He shrugged his shoulders, which I loved.

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

It makes me sick. Physical things. Forty years of loving someone becomes staples and tape.

When I looked at you, my life made sense. Even the bad things made sense.

Every moment before this one depends on this one.

He looked confused, or embarrassed, or surprised, or maybe even mad. I couldn’t tell what he was feeling, because I couldn’t speak the language of his feelings.

feeling pain is still better than not feeling, isn’t it?

I promised myself I wouldn’t be the first to look away, but I was.

one hundred ceilings had become one hundred floors, which had become nothing,

the world is so big and small, in the same moment we were close and far.

I thought I heard the rim of a glass against the door, was it a glass I once drank water from, had it ever touched your lips?

“Look at me or leave me. But don’t stay and look at anything else.”

What’s the point of a lie that doesn’t protect anything?

we took off each other’s clothes with the slowness of people who know how easy it is to be proven wrong,

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

were we sharing something without either of us knowing it?

I wanted to give him an infinitely long blank book and the rest of time,

He thought for a minute. I hated how he had to think.

I looked in everyone’s eyes, but none were his.

I wanted him to have good memories, so that maybe he would come back again one day. Or at least miss me.

I tried to notice everything, because I wanted to be able to remember it perfectly.

It’s better to lose than never to have had.

I invented a book that listed every word in every language. It wouldn’t be a very useful book, but you could hold it and know that everything you could possibly say was in your hands.

What about a kite-string bracelet?