Quotes from book
Everything Is Illuminated

Name: Everything Is Illuminated
Author: Jonathan Safran Foer

Everything Is Illuminated is the first novel by the American writer Jonathan Safran Foer, published in 2002. It was adapted into a film of the same name starring Elijah Wood and Eugene Hütz in 2005.

“One day you will do things for me that you hate. That is what it means to be family.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Everything Is Illuminated

Source: Everything Is Illuminated

“She was not crying
Which surprised me very much
But I understand now
That she had found places
For her melancholy
That were behind more masks
Than only her eyes”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Everything Is Illuminated

Source: Everything Is Illuminated

“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.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Everything Is Illuminated

Everything Is Illuminated (2002)

“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.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Everything Is Illuminated

Everything Is Illuminated (2002)

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

Jonathan Safran Foer book Everything Is Illuminated

Source: Everything Is Illuminated

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

Jonathan Safran Foer book Everything Is Illuminated

Source: Everything Is Illuminated

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

Jonathan Safran Foer book Everything Is Illuminated

Source: Everything Is Illuminated

“She has become an expert at confusingwithwithwith.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Everything Is Illuminated

Source: Everything Is Illuminated

“The only way to overcome sadness is to consume it.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Everything Is Illuminated

Source: Everything Is Illuminated

“I am doing something I hate for you. This is what it means to be in love.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Everything Is Illuminated

Source: Everything Is Illuminated

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

Jonathan Safran Foer book Everything Is Illuminated

Variant: The only thing worse than being sad is for others to know you are sad.
Source: Everything Is Illuminated

“She was a genius of sadness, immersing herself in it, separating its numerous strands, appreciating its subtle nuances. She was a prism through which sadness could be divided into its infinite spectrum.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Everything Is Illuminated

Source: Everything Is Illuminated

“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.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Everything Is Illuminated

Source: Everything Is Illuminated

“I will describe my eyes and then begin the story. My eyes are blue and resplendent. Now I will begin the story.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Everything Is Illuminated

Source: Everything Is Illuminated

“Everything is to protect you. I exist in case you need to be protected.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Everything Is Illuminated

Source: Everything Is Illuminated (2002)
Context: "You do not have to present not-truths to me, Sasha. I am not a child."(But I do. That is what you always fail to understand. I present not-truths in order to protect you. That is also why I try so inflexibly to be a funny person. Everything is to protect you. I exist in case you need to be protected.)

“Once you hear something, you can never return to the time before you heard it.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Everything Is Illuminated

Source: Everything Is Illuminated

“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.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Everything Is Illuminated

Source: Everything Is Illuminated

“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.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Everything Is Illuminated

Source: Everything Is Illuminated (2002)

“[She] always knew he was a fiction but believed in him anyway.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Everything Is Illuminated

Source: Everything Is Illuminated