Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

by Jonathan Safran Foer

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.

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

I’m never exactly sure when we’re playing the game and when she’s just saying my name, so I always let her know that I’m OK.

there’s nothing wrong with not understanding yourself.

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

“War!” Mr. Goldberg said, angry and defeated, his voice trembling: “We go on killing each other to no purpose! It is war waged by humanity against humanity, and it will only end when there’s no one left to fight!”

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,

incredibly close to everything in the universe, but also extremely alone. 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?

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!”

“It’s not a horrible world,” he told me, putting a Cambodian mask on his face, “but it’s filled with a lot of horrible people!”

Another reason it would be a good invention is that there are so many times when you know you’re feeling a lot of something, but you don’t know what the something is. Am I frustrated? Am I actually just panicky? And that confusion changes your mood, it becomes your mood, and you become a confused, gray person. But with the special water, you could look at your orange hands and think, I’m happy! That whole time I was actually happy! What a relief!

It was so strange to see him from a distance. So small.

I spent my life learning to feel less. Every day I felt less. Is that growing old? Or is it something worse? You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.

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. The memory of his arm wraps around me as his arm used to. Each day has been chained to the previous one. But the weeks have had wings. Anyone who believes that a second is faster than a decade did not live my life.

His hair turned gray that winter. I thought it was snow. He promised us that everything would be OK. I was a child, but I knew that everything would not be OK. That did not make my father a liar. It made him my father.

“The boy asked the girl to say ‘I love you’ into her can, giving her no further explanation. “And she didn’t ask for any, or say ‘That’s silly,’ or ‘We’re too young for love,’ or even suggest that she was saying ‘I love you’ because he asked her to. Instead she said, ‘I love you.’ The words traveled the yo-yo, the doll, the diary, the necklace, the quilt, the clothesline, the birthday present, the harp, the tea bag, the tennis racket, the hem of the skirt he one day should have pulled from her body.” “Grody!” “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.

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.

I told Mr. Black that I was panicky, and he said it was OK to be panicky. I told him I felt like I couldn’t do it, and he said it was OK to feel like I couldn’t do it. I told him it was the thing that I was most afraid of. He said he could understand why.

As the elevator takes you up, you hear information about the building, which was pretty fascinating, and I normally would have taken some notes, but I needed all of my concentration for being brave.

Everything that’s born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they’re all on fire, and we’re all trapped.

I said, “Hi, Peter. I’ll protect you.”

I thought about waking her. But it was unnecessary. There would be other nights. And how can you say I love you to someone you love?