Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

by Jonathan Safran Foer

In other words, if everyone wanted to play Hamlet at once, they couldn’t, because there aren’t enough skulls!

I loved having a dad who was smarter than the New York Times, and I loved how my cheek could feel the hairs on his chest through his T-shirt, and how he always smelled like shaving, even at the end of the day. Being with him made my brain quiet. I didn’t have to invent a thing.

the distance that wedged itself between me and my happiness wasn’t the world, it wasn’t the bombs and burning buildings, it was me, my thinking, the cancer of never letting go,

I think and think and think, I’ve thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.

old people who sit around all day because no one remembers to spend time with them and they’re embarrassed to ask people to spend time with them,

That secret was a hole in the middle of me that every happy thing fell into.

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.

But I knew that there couldn’t be pockets that enormous. 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.

Darling, You asked me to write you a letter, so I am writing you a letter. I do not know why I am writing this letter, or what this letter is supposed to be about, but I am writing it nonetheless, because I love you very much and trust that you have some good purpose for having me write this letter. I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love. Your father

She loved to jump on her bed. She jumped on her bed for so many years that one afternoon, while I watched her jump, the seams burst. Feathers filled the small room. Our laughter kept the feathers in the air. I thought about birds. Could they fly if there wasn’t someone, somewhere, laughing?

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.

“You’re not being annoying,” she said, but it’s extremely hard to believe someone when they tell you that.

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

she went home with her father, 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.

“That explains why, each of the last six days, you weren’t at your house.” We stopped laughing, I took the world into me, rearranged it, and sent it back out as a question: “Do you like me?”

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 felt, that night, on that stage, under that skull, 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.

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!”

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? If you were extremely excited your skin would turn green, and if you were angry you’d turn red, obviously, and if you felt like shiitake you’d turn brown, and if you were blue you’d turn blue.

Shyness is when you turn your head away from something you want. Shame is when you turn your head away from something you do not want.

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 regret that it takes a life to learn how to live, Oskar. Because if I were able to live my life again, I would do things differently.

When we got to the grave and they lowered the empty coffin, you let out a noise like an animal. I had never heard anything like it. You were a wounded animal. The noise is still in my ears.

I wanted to carry the closet door with me so I could always look at him through the keyhole,

I tried to learn about him as he tried to learn about you, 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?

Here is the point of everything I have been trying to tell you, Oskar. It’s always necessary. I love you, Grandma