Quotes from book

Everything Is Illuminated

“She was like a drowning person, flailing, reaching for anything that might save her. Her life was an urgent, desperate struggle to justify her life.”

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

“The bruises go away, and so does how you hate, and so does the feeling that everything you receive from life is something you have earned.”

“It is not a thing that you can imagine. It only is. After that, there can be no imagining.”

“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.”

“To feel alone is to be alone.”

“With writing, we have second chances.”

“You are the only one who has understood even a whisper of me, and I will tell you that I am the only person who has understood even a whisper of you.”

“Everything is the way it is because everything was the way it was. Sometimes I feel ensnared in this, as if no matter what I do, what will come has already been fixed.”

“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.”

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

“… there are only some many times you can utter "It does not hurt" before it begins to hurt even more than the hurt.”

“It would be possible, in theory, for life and art to be reversed.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“She is deranged, but so so playful.”

“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.”