Quotes by Jonathan Safran Foer

“If limousines were extremely long, they wouldnt need drivers. You could just get in the back seat, walk through the limousine, and then get out of the front seat, which would be where you wanted to go.”

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

I love you also means I love you more than anyone loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that no one loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that I love no one else, and never have loved anyone else, and never will love anyone else.

Time was passing like a hand waving from a train I wanted to be on. I hope you never have to think about anything as much as I think about you.

If there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it walls, and we will furnish it with soft, red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jewellers felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesnt exist, and I have tried everything that does.

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 is in heavy boots.

Why are you leaving me?He wrote, I do not know how to live.I do not know either but I am trying.I do not know how to try.There were some things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him. So i buried them and let them hurt me

Every widow wakes one morning, perhaps after years of pure and unwavering grieving, to realize she slept a good nights sleep, and will be able to eat breakfast, and doesnt hear her husbands ghost all the time, but only some of the time. Her grief is replaced with a useful sadness. Every parent who loses a child finds a way to laugh again. The timbre begins to fade. The edge dulls. The hurt lessens. Every love is carved from loss. Mine was. Yours is. Your great-great-great-grandchildrens will be. But we learn to live in that love.

I wanted to tell her everything, maybe if Id been able to, we could have lived differently, maybe Id be there with you now instead of here. Maybe... if Id said, Im so afraid of losing something I love that I refuse to love anything, maybe that would have made the impossible possible. Maybe, but I couldnt do it, I had buried too much too deeply inside me. And here I am, instead of there.

You are the only one who has understood even a whisper of me, and I will tell you that I am the only person who has understood even a whisper of you.

I imagine a line, a white line, painted on the sand and on the ocean, from me to you.

I went to a tattoo parlor and had YES written onto the palm of my left hand, and NO onto my right palm, what can I say, it hasnt made my life wonderful, its made life possible, when I rub my hands against each other in the middle of winter I am warming myself with the friction of YES and NO, when I clap my hands I am showing my appreciation through the uniting and parting of YES and NO, I signify book by peeling open my hands, every book, for me, is the balance of YES and NO, even this one, my last one, especially this one. Does it break my heart, of course, every moment of every day, into more pieces than my heart was made of, I never thought of myself as quiet, much less silent, I never thought about things at all, everything changed, the distance that wedged itself between me and my happiness wasnt the world, it wasnt the bombs and burning buildings, it was me, my thinking, the cancer of never letting go, is ignorance bliss, I dont know, but its so painful to think, and tell me, what did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever bring me? I think and think and think, Ive thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.

Brods life was a slow realization that the world was not for her, and that for whatever reason, she would never be happy and honest at the same time. She felt as if she were brimming, always producing and hoarding more love inside her. But there was no release...So she had to satisfy herself with the idea of love--loving the loving of things whose existence she didnt care at all about. Love itself became the object of her love. She loved herself in love, she loved loving love, as love loves loving, and was able, in that way, to reconcile herself with a world that fell so short of what she would have hoped for. It was not the world that was the great and saving lie, but her willingness to make it beautiful and fair, to live a once-removed life, in a world once-removed from the one in which everyone else seemed to exist.

He promised us that everything would be okay. I was a child, but I knew that everything would not be okay. That did not make my father a liar. It made him my father.

She let out a laugh, and then she put her hand over her mouth, like she was angry at herself for forgetting her sadness.

(What are your ghosts like?)(They are on the insides of the lids of my eyes.)(This is also where my ghosts reside.)(You have ghosts?)(Of course I have ghosts.)(But you are a child.)(I am not a child.)(But you have not known love.)(These are my ghosts, the spaces amid love.)

Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives Im not living.

Why didnt I learn to treat everything like it was the last time. My greatest regret was how much I believed in the future.

It was not the feeling of completeness I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty.

Im sorry for my inability to let unimportant things go, for my inability to hold on to the important things.