Jonathan Safran Foer citations

Page 5

“I looked at everyone and wondered where they came from, and who they missed, and what they were sorry for.”

“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.”

“There is nothing wrong with compromising, even if you are compromising almost everything.”

“Let love write on you for awhile.”

“He ran the back of his hand up her cheek, with the pretense of wiping away sweat.”

“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?”

“I wasn’t having second thoughts, but I was having thoughts.”

“If we were to one day encounter a form of life more powerful and intelligent than our own, and it regarded us as we regard fish, what would be our argument against being eaten?”

“I try not to remember the life that I didn’t want to lose but lost and have to remember”

“We burned with love for ourselves, all of us, starters of the fire we suffered- our love was the affliction for which only our love was the cure.”

“Ironically, the utterly unselective omnivore -- "I'm easy; I'll eat anything" -- can appear more socially sensitive than the individual who tries to eat in a way that is good for society.”

“I used to think that humor was the only way to appreciate how wonderful and terrible the world is, to celebrate how big life is. But now I think the opposite. Humor is a way of shrinking from that wonderful and terrible world.”

“… sometimes you have to put your fears in order…”

“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.”

“Please be truthful, but also please be benevolent, please.”

“Love itself became the object of her love. She loved herself in love, she loved loving love, as love loves loving, and was able, in that way, to reconcile herself with a world that fell so short of what she would have hoped for.”

“I'd lost count of the disappointments.”

“She wrote, I wish I could be a girl again, with a chance to live my life again. I have suffered so much more than I needed to. And the joys I have felt have not always been joyous. I could have lived differently.”

“If it weren't my life, I wouldn't have believed it.”

“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.”