Jonathan Safran Foer: Trending quotes (page 8)

“Something having been done just about everywhere just about always is no kind of justification for doing it now.”

“If I’d been someone else in a different world I’d've done something different, but I was myself and the world was the world, so I was silent.”

“I said, 'I need to know how he died.'
He flipped back and pointed at, 'Why?'
So I can stop inventing how he died. I'm always inventing.”

“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.”

“It made me start to wonder if there were other people so lonely so close. I thought about “Eleanor Rigby.” It’s true, where do they all come from? And where do they all belong?”

“It's always possible to wake someone from sleep, but no amount of noise will wake someone who is pretending to be asleep.”

“I put my hand on the doorknob because I thought maybe her hand was on the doorknob on the other side.”

“When you look up 'hilarious' in the dictionary, there's a picture of you.”

“Sadness of love without release.”

“She extended a hand that I didn't know how to take, so I broke its fingers with my silence.”

“I read the first chapter ofwhen Dad was still alive, and I got incredibly heavy boots about how relatively insignificant life is, and how, compared to the universe and compared to time, it didn't even matter if I existed at all.”

“I went to the guest room and pretended to write. I hit the space bar again and again and again. My life story was spaces.”

“Also, I designed a pretty fascinating bracelet, where you put a rubber band around your favorite book of poems for a year, and then you take it off and wear it.”

“I know you look both ways before you cross the street, but I want you to look both ways a second time, because I told you to.”

“I would have done anything for him. Maybe that was my sickness.”

“Anyone who believes that a second is faster than a decade did not live life.”

“The paper, the stapler, the staples, the tape. It makes me sick. Physical things. Forty years of loving someone becomes staples and tape.”

“… the meaning of my thoughts started to float away from me, like leaves that fall from a tree into a river, I was the tree, the world was the river.”

“To feel alone is to be alone.”