Heather > Heather's Quotes

“My life story is the story of everyone I've ever met.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“You can't love anything more than something you miss.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“you will rise.
and are you less of a woman for this? no
what is woman?
woman is this—enduring.
listen girl, you will survive this–you will.
but what fool said you had to do it silently?
here is a tip—scream”
― Salma Deera, Letters From Medea

“Svetlana said that I thought of myself as a robot who could act only negatively. She said I had cynical ideas about language. “You think language is an end in itself. You don’t believe it stands for anything. No, it’s not that you don’t believe—it’s that you don’t care. For you, language itself is a self-sufficient system.”

“But it is a self-sufficient system.”

“Do you see what you’re saying? This is how you get yourself involved with the devil incarnate. Ivan sensed this attitude in you. He’s cynical in the same way you are only more so, because of math. It’s like you said: math is a language that started out so abstract, more abstract than words, and then suddenly it turned out to be the most real, the most physical thing there was. With math they built the atomic bomb. Suddenly this abstract language is leaving third-degree burns on your skin. Now there’s this special language that can control everything, and manipulate everything, and if you’re the elite who speaks it—you can control everything.

“Ivan wanted to try an experiment, a game. It would never have worked with someone different, on someone like me. But you, you’re so disconnected from truth, you were so ready to jump into a reality the two of you made up, just through language. Naturally, it made him want to see how far he could go. You went further and further—and then something went wrong. It couldn’t continue in the same way. It had to develop into something else—into sex, or something else. But for some reason, it didn’t. The experiment didn’t work. But by now you’re so, so far from all the landmarks. You’re just drifting in space.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot

“And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees
and changing leaves.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“Why didn't I learn to treat everything like it was the last time. My greatest regret was how much I believed in the future.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“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, like new batteries in the flashlight in the emergency kit in the hall closet.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“Why do beautiful songs make you sad?' 'Because they aren't true.' 'Never?' 'Nothing is beautiful and true.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“There were things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him. So I buried them, and let them hurt me.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“I feel too much. That's what's going on.' 'Do you think one can feel too much? Or just feel in the wrong ways?' 'My insides don't match up with my outsides.' 'Do anyone's insides and outsides match up?' 'I don't know. I'm only me.' 'Maybe that's what a person's personality is: the difference between the inside and outside.' 'But it's worse for me.' 'I wonder if everyone thinks it's worse for him.' 'Probably. But it really is worse for me.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“I took the world into me, rearranged it, and sent it back out as a question: "Do you like me?”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“Every moment before this one depends on this one.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“Even if I don't like what I am, I know what I am. My children like what they are, but they don't know what they are. So tell me which is worse.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“I didn't understand why I needed help, because it seemed to me that you should wear heavy boots when your dad dies, and if you aren't wearing heavy boots, then you need help.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“We were trying to make our lives easier, trying, with all our rules, to make life effortless. But a friction began to arise between Nothing and Something, in the morning the Nothing vase cast a Something shadow, like the memory of someone you've lost, what can you say about that, at night the Nothing light spilled from the guest room spilled under the Nothing door and stained the Something hallway, there's nothing to say. ”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“Instead of singing in the shower, I would write out the lyrics of my favourite songs, the ink would turn the water blue or red or green, and the music would run down my legs.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“Each day has been chained to the previous one. But the weeks have wings. Anyone who believes that a second is faster than a decade did not live my life.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“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.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“I thought for a minute, and then I got heavy, heavy boots.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“And also, there are so many times when you need to make a quick escape, but humans don't have their own wings, or not yet, anyway, so what about a birdseed shirt?”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“I realized I was on a something island. 'How did I get here,' I wondered, surrounded by Nothing, "and how can I get back? ”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“My boots were so heavy that I was glad there was a column beneath us. How could such a lonely person have been living so close to me my whole life? If I had known, I would have gone up to keep him company.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“Josh had told me a long time ago that he had this theory that an entire relationship was based on what occurred over the course of the first five minutes you know each other. That everything that came after those first minutes was just details being filled in. Meaning: you already knew how deep the love was, how instinctually you felt about someone.

What happened in their first five minutes?

Time stopped.”
― Laura Dave, London is the Best City in America

“You deserve to need me, not to have me.”
― Augusten Burroughs, Running with Scissors

“I'm sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“It's everybody, I mean. Everything everybody does is so — I don't know — not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and — sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you're conforming just as much only in a different way.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“She said she knew she was able to fly because when she came down she always had dust on her fingers from touching the light bulbs.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“I am haunted by humans.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“The only thing worse than a boy who hates you: a boy that loves you.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“Begin at the beginning," the King said, very gravely, "and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland