Jonathan Safran Foer: Thing

“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.”

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

“The only thing more painful than being an active forgetter is to be an inert rememberer.”

“The mistakes I've made are dead to me. But I can't take back the things I never did.”

“Being with him made my brain quiet. I didn't have to invent a thing.”

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

“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.”

“When I looked at you, my life made sense. Even the bad things made sense. They were necessary to make you possible.”

“I'm sorry for my inability to let unimportant things go, for my inability to hold on to the important things.”

“I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others -- The only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad.”

“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”

“That secret was a hole in the middle of me that every happy thing fell into.”

“It was terrible. All of the things we couldn't share. The room was filled with conversations we weren't having.”

“A few weeks after the worst day, I started writing lots of letters. I don't know why, but it was one of the only things that made my boots lighter.”

“She said, "Do you have more things that you need, or more that you don't need?" I said, "It depends on what it means to need.”

“It was getting hard to keep all the things I didn't know inside me.”

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

“There were things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him, so I buried them, and let them hurt me.”

“Highs and lows make you feel that things matter, but they're nothing." "So what's something?" "Being reliable is something. Being good.”