Jonathan Safran Foer citations

Page 2

“Instead of singing in the shower, I would write out the lyrics of my favourite songs, the ink would turn the water blue or red or green, and the music would run down my legs.”

“The end of the world has come often, and continues to come.”

“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.”

“She laughed enough to migrate an entire flock of birds. That was how she said yes”

“Why I'm Not Where You Are”

“I can forgive you for leaving, but not for coming back.”

“It's a shame that we have to live, but it's a tragedy that we get to live only one life.”

“It's so beautiful at this hour. The sun is low, the shadows are long, the air is cold and clean. You won't be awake for another five hours, but I can't help feeling that we're sharing this clear and beautiful morning.”

“Everything is the way it is because everything was the way it was”

“Memory was supposed to fill the time, but it made time a hole to be filled.”

“I wondered, for the first time in my life, if life was worth all the work it took to live. What exactly made it worth it?”

“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.”

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

“I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love.”

“Why do beautiful songs make you sad?" "Because they aren't true." "Never?" "Nothing is beautiful and true.”

“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.”

“Songs are as sad as the listener.”

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

“This is love, she thought, isn't it? When you notice someone's absence and hate that absence more than anything? More, even, than you love his presence?”

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

“It's the tragedy of loving, you can't love anything more than something you miss.”

“My life story is the story of everyone I've ever met.”

“I don't think that there are any limits to how excellent we could make life seem.”

“he came to think, It surprised him that strangers didn't stop each other on the street to say”

“Shyness is when you turn your head away from something you want. Shame is when you turn your head away from something you do not want.”

“She had fallen in love so many times that she began to suspect she was not falling in love at all, but doing something much more ordinary.”