Jonathan Safran Foer: Likeness

“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.”

“We talked about nothing in particular, but it felt like we were talking about the most important things…”

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

“It feels like a moment I've lived a thousand times before, as if everything is familiar, right up to the moment of my death, that it will happen again an infinite number of times, that we will meet, marry, have our children, succeed in the ways we have, fail in the ways we have, all exactly the same, always unable to change a thing. I am again at the bottom of an unstoppable wheel, and when I feel my eyes close for death, as they have and will a thousand times, I awake.”

“My friends are appeased to stay in Odessa for their entire lives. They are appeased to age like their parents, and become parents like their parents. They do not desire anything more than everything they have known.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I took the world into me, rearranged it, and sent it back out as a question: "Do you like me?”

“She was like a drowning person, flailing, reaching for anything that might save her. Her life was an urgent, desperate struggle to justify her life.”

“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.”

“I want an infinitely blank book and the rest of time…
… why didn't I learn to treat everything like it was the last time, my greatest regret is how much I believed in the future.”

“I could not believe in a God that would challenge faith like this.”

“It was the first time I had ever made love. I wondered if he knew that. It felt like crying. I wondered, Why does anyone ever make love?”

“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.”

“… 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.”

“I was of the opinion that the past is past, and like all that is not now it should remain buried along the side of our memories.”

“She wanted more, more slang, more figures of speech, the bee's knees, the cats pajamas, horse of a different color, dog-tired, she wanted to talk like she was born here, like she never came from anywhere else”

“I didn't feel empty. I wished I'd felt empty…. I wanted to be empty like an overturned pitcher. But I was full like a stone.”

“She wanted nothing more than someone to miss, to touch, with whom to speak like a child, with whom to be a child.”