Jonathan Safran Foer citations

Page 7

“For how long could we fail until we surrendered?”

“Sometimes one simply wants to disappear.”

“That’s all anyone wants from anyone else, not love itself but the knowledge that love is there.”

“Memories are small prayers to God, if we believed in that sort of thing.”

“People around the world were moving from one place to another. No one was staying.”

“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”

“Everything I did, I did because I thought it was the correct thing to do… I am not a hero, it is true… But I am not a bad person, either.”

“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.”

“In my family, Father is the world champion at ending conversations.”

“I wanted so much to have a life. Even just once, even for a second.”

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

“She repeats things until they are true, or until she can't tell whether they are true or not. She has become an expert at confusing what is with what was with what should be with what could be.”

“You only get to keep what you refuse to let go of.”

“He was someone whom everyone admired and liked but whom nobody knew. He was like a book that you could feel good holding, that you could talk about without ever having read, that you could recommend.”

“What do babies dream of? She must be dreaming of the before-life, just as I dream of the afterlife.”

“One of the greatest opportunities to live our values-or betray them-lies in the food we put on our plates.”

“I saw Herschel and he saw me and we stood next to each other because that is what friends do in the presence of evil or love.”

“I am not a bad person. I am a good person who has lived in a bad time."
Alex's grandfather.. Everything is Illuminated”

“They learned to hate her unknowability, her untouchability, the collage of her.”

“I zipped myself all the way into the sleeping bag of myself, not because I was hurt, and not because I had broken something, but because they were cracking up.”

“… and when is enough proof enough?”

“Well, let me leave it at this: if God does exist, He would have a great deal be sad about. And if He doesn’t exist, then that too would make Him quite sad, I imagine. So to answer your question, God must be sad.”

“We had everything to say to each other, but no ways to say it.”

“And she would say, "Today you believe in God?" And he would say, "Today I believe in love".”

“Things were happening around us, but nothing was happening between us.”

“And how can you say I love you to someone you love? I rolled onto my side and fell asleep next to her. Here is the point of everything I have been trying to tell you, Oskar. It's always necessary.”

“What if I never stop inventing?”

“Money can't buy you happiness, but happiness isn't everything.”

“They reciprocated the great and saving lie--that our love for things is greater than our lover for our love for things--willfully playing the parts they wrote for themselves, willfully creating and believing fictions necessary for life.”