Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

by Jonathan Safran Foer

Anyway, the fascinating thing was that I read in National Geographic that there are more people alive now than have died in all of human history. In other words, if everyone wanted to play Hamlet at once, they couldn't, because there aren't enough skulls!

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

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

In bed that night I invented a special drain that would be underneath every pillow in New York, and would connect to the reservoir. Whenever people cried themselves to sleep, the tears would all go to the same place, and in the morning the weatherman could report if the water level of the Reservoir of Tears had gone up or down, and you could know if New York was in heavy boots. And when something really terrible happened—like a nuclear bomb, or at least a biological weapons attack—an extremely loud siren would go off, telling everyone to get to Central Park to put sandbags around the reservoir.

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

"Life is scarier than death."