Jonathan Safran Foer

“I was not going to dance at our wedding and you were not going to speak.”

“... the man took my passport and asked me the purpose of my visit, I wrote in my daybook, 'To mourn,' and then, 'To try to live,' he gave me a look and asked if I would consider that business or pleasure, I wrote, 'Neither.' 'For how long do you plan to mourn and try to live?' I wrote, 'For the rest of my life.”

“... His arm was so thick and strong. I was sure it would protect me for as long as I lived. And it did. Even after I lost him. The memory of his arm wraps around me as his arm used to. Each day has been chained to the previous one. But the weeks have had wings. Why are you leaving me?He wrote, I do not know how to live. I do not know either, but I am trying.I do not know how to try. There were things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him. So I buried them, and let them hurt me.I put my hand on him. Touching him was always so important to me. It was something I lived for. My fingers against his shoulder. The outsides of our thighs touching as we squeezed together on the bus. I couldn't explain it, but I needed it. Sometimes I imagined stitching all of our little touches together. How many hundreds of thousands of fingers brushing against each other does it take to make love. Why does anyone ever make love? ...”

“I said, I want to tell you something.She said, you can tell me tomorrow.I had never told her how much I loved her. She was my sister. We slept in the same bed. There was never a right time to say it. It was always unnecessary. The books in my father's shed were sighing. The sheets were rising and falling around me with Anna's breathing. I thought about waking her. But it was unnecessary. There would be other nights. 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 ... It's always necessary.”

“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.”

“Do you eat chicken because you are familiar with the scientific literature on them and have decided that their suffering doesn't matter, or do you do it because it tastes good?”

“We know, at least, that this decision (ending factory farming) will help prevent deforestation, curb global warming, reduce pollution, save oil reserves, lessen the burden on rural America, decrease human rights abuses, improve publish health, and help eliminate the most systematic animal abuse in history.”

“Succotash my Balzac, dipshiitake.”

“But I knew that there couldn't be pockets that enormous. In the end, everyone loses everyone. There was no invention to get around that, and so I felt, that night, like the turtle that everything else in the universe was on top of.”

“In the past seven years of love-making he had heard the words "I love you" so many times:from the mouths of widows and children, from prostitutes, family friends, travelers, and adulterous wives. Women said "I love you" without his ever speaking. "The more you love someone," he came to think, "the harder it is to tell them." It surprised him that strangers didn't stop each other on the street to say "I love you".”

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

“The images of his infinite pasts and infinite futures washed over him as he waited, paralyzed, in the present.”

“[S]o if the device of the person in the ambulance detected the device of the person he loved the most, or the person who loved him the most, and the person in the ambulance was really badly hurt, and might even die, the ambulance could flash GOODBYE! I LOVE YOU! GOODBYE! I LOVE YOU!”

“...accepting the compromise of the way we have been, the way we are, and the way we will likely be...may we live together in unwavering love and good health, amen.”

“What? she said once to herself, and then once aloud, What? She felt a total displacement, like a spinning globe brought to a sudden halt by the light touch of a finger. How did she end up here, like this? How could there have been so much - so many moments, so many people and things, so many razors and pillows, timepieces and subtle coffins - without her being aware? How did her life live itself without her?”

“Words never mean what we want them to mean.”

“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.”

“We were trying to make our lives easier, trying, with all our rules, to make life effortless. But a friction began to arise between Nothing and Something, in the morning the Nothing vase cast a Something shadow, like the memory of someone you've lost, what can you say about that, at night the Nothing light spilled from the guest room spilled under the Nothing door and stained the Something hallway, there's nothing to say. ”

“It’s not that I want people to think I am smart, or even that I am a good writer. I write because I want to end my loneliness.”

“In the morning, when the nothing vase casts a something shadow, like the memory of someone you've lost, what can you say about that?”

“I wanted to tell her everything, maybe if I'd been able to, we could have lived differently, maybe I'd be there with you now instead of here. Maybe... if I'd said, 'I'm so afraid of losing something I love that I refuse to love anything,' maybe that would have made the impossible possible. Maybe, but I couldn't do it, I had buried too much too deeply inside me. And here I am, instead of there.”

“I realized that your mother couldn't see the emptiness, she couldn't see anything...All of the words I'd written to her over all of those years, had I never said anything to hear at all?”

“He looked so much like me, I could tell that he saw it, too, we shared the smile of recognizing ourselves in each other, how many imposters do I have? DO we all make the same mistakes, or has one of us gotten it right, or even just a bit less wrong, am I the imposter?”

“I hated myself for going, why couldn't I be the kind of person who stays?”

“Thomas! What are you doing!" and I gestured, "I thought this was Nothing," covering myself with one of my daybooks ,and she said, "It's Something!”

“I would have done anything for him. Maybe that was my sickness. We made love in nothing places and turned the lights off. It felt like crying. We could not look at each other. It always had to be from behind. Like that first time. And I knew he wasn't thinking of me.He squeezed my sides so hard, and pushed so hard. Like he was trying to push me through to somewhere else.Why does anyone ever make love?”

“But come. No explaining or mending. Be beside me somewhere.”

“E adesso, permettimi di chiederti come pensi che riuscirai a ottenere i risultati che mi hai elencato.”“Seppellirò i miei sentimenti nel profondo di me.”“Che cosa intendi per seppellire i tuoi sentimenti?”“Anche se saranno fortissimi non li lascerò uscire. Se dovrò piangere, piangerò dentro. Se dovrò sanguinare, mi verranno dei lividi. Se il mio cuore comincerà a dare i numeri, non ne parlerò con nessuno al mondo. Tanto non serve. Rovina solamente la vita a tutti.”

“So many people enter and leave your life! Hundreds of thousands of people! You have to keep the door open so they can come in! But it also means you have to let them go!”

“We could imagine all sorts of universes unlike this one, but this is the one that happened.”

“After a time, I had only a handful of words left... Does it break my heart, of course, every moment of every day, into more pieces than my heart was made of, I never thought of myself as quiet, much less silent, I never thought about things at all, everything changed, the distance that wedged itself between me and my happiness wasn't the world, it wasn't the bombs and burning buildings, it was me, my thinking, the cancer of never letting go, is ignorance bliss, I don't know, but it's so painful to think, and tell me, what did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever bring me? I think and think and think, I've thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.”

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

“We laughed and laughed, together and separately, out loud and silently, we were determined to ignore whatever needed to be ignored, to build a new world from nothing if nothing in our world could be salvaged, it was one of the best days of my life, a day during which I lived my life and didn't think about my life at all.”

“We believed in our grandmother’s cooking more fervently than we believed in God.”

“She is deranged, but so so playful.”

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

“If we are not given the option to live without violence, we are given the choice to center our meals around harvest or slaughter, husbandry or war. We have chosen slaughter. We have chosen war. That's the truest version of our story of eating animals.Can we tell a new story?”

“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.”

“Writing's funny, it's like walking down a hall in the dark looking for the light switch, and suddenly you find it, flip it on, and then you discover the hallway you passed through is papered with the novel you've written.”

“I am always sad, I think. Perhaps this signifies that I am not sad at all, because sadness is something lower than your normal disposition, and I am always the same thing. Perhaps I am the only person in the world, then, who never becomes sad. Perhaps I am lucky.”

“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.”

“I imagine a line, a white line, painted on the sand and on the ocean, from me to you.”

“I've thought myself out of happinessone one million times, but never once into it.”

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

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

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

“I put my hand on him. Touching him has always been important to me, it was something I lived for. I never could explain why. Little, nothing touches, my fingers against his shoulder, the outsides of our thighs touching as we squeeled together on the bus. I couldnt explain it, but I needed it. Sometimes I imagined stiching all of our little touches together. How many hundreds of thousands of fingers brushing against each other does it take to make love?”

“But it was unnecessary.There would be other nights.And how can you say I love you to someone you love? I rolled on my side and fell asleep next to her.Here is the point of everything I've been trying to tell you, Oskar.It's always necessary.I love you,Grandma”

“- D'après toi, pourquoi es-tu ici, Oskar ?- Je suis ici, docteur, parce que maman est inquiète que la vie me mette devant des difficultés insurmontables.- Est-ce qu'elle a raison de s'inquiéter ?- Pas vraiment. La vie est une difficulté insurmontable.”

“This brings me back to the image of Kafka standing before a fish in the Berlin aquarium, a fish on which his gaze fell in a newly found peace after he decided not to eat animals. Kafka recognized that fish as a member of his invisible family- not as his equal, of course, but as another being that was his concern.”