Quotes by Jonathan Safran Foer

“That is what death is like. It doesnt matter what uniforms the soldiers are wearing. It doesnt matter how good the weapons are. I thought if everyone could see what I saw, we would never have war anymore.”

“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.”

“Feathers filled the small room. Our laughter kept the feathers in the air. I thought about birds. Could they fly if there wasnt someone, somewhere, laughing?”

“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.”

“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 dont think that there are any limits to how excellent we could make life seem.”

“Find a printer paper and imagine a full-grown bird shaped something like a football with legs standing on it. Imagine 33,000 of these rectangles in a grid. (Broilers are never in cages, and never on multiple levels.) Now enclose the grid with windowless walls and put a ceiling on top. Run in automated (drug-laced) feed, water, heating, and ventilation systems. This is a farm.”

“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 cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.”

“When I heard your organization was recording testimonies, I knew I had to come. She died in my arms, saying I dont want to die. That is what death is like. It doesnt matter what uniforms the soldiers are wearing. It doesnt matter how good the weapons are. I thought if everyone could see what I saw, we would never have war anymore.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Its true, I am afraid of dying. I am afraid of the world moving forward without me, of my absence going unnoticed, or worse, being some natural force propelling life on. Is it selfish? Am I such a bad person for dreaming of a world that ends when I do? I dont mean the world ending with respect to me, but every set of eyes closing with mine.”

“She died in my arms, saying, I dont want to die. That is what death is like. It doesnt matter what uniforms the soldiers are wearing. It doesnt matter how good the weapons are. I thought if everyone could see what I saw, we would never have war anymore.”

“I thought about all of the things that everyone ever says to each other, and how everyone is going to die, whether its in a millisecond, or days, or months, or 76.5 years, if you were just born. Everything thats born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but theyre all on fire, and were all trapped.”

“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.”

“...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.”

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

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

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