Jonathan Safran Foer

“I am very simple to enchant.”

“I can be funny, because I have time to meditate about how to be funny, and I can repair my mistakes when I perform mistakes, and I can be a melancholy person in manners that are interesting, not only melancholy. With writing, we have second chances.”

“I wouldn't want a boy to think I was pretty unless he was the kind of boy who thought I was pretty.”

“I didn't want to hear about death. It was all anyone talked about, even when no one was actually talking about it.”

“He talked and talked, his words fell through him, trying to find the floor of his sadness.”

“It is my great hope that our paths, however long and winding, will cross again.”

“The room was filled with conversations we weren't having.”

“She hid these things in the forest so that she could find them when she returned, and then she went forth." "Where?" "Places." "Where?" "Russia. Other places." "Then?" "Then she returned." "Why?" "To gather the things she had hidden, and to discover what remained. Everyone who went back was certain that she would discover her house and her friends and even the relatives that she saw killed. It is said that the Messiah will come at the end of the world." "But it was not the end of the world," Grandfather said. "It was. He just did not come." "Why did he not come?" "This is the lesson we learned from everything that happened -- there is no God. It took all of the hidden faces for Him to prove this to us." "What if it was a challenge of your faith?" I said. "I could not believe in a God that would challenge faith like this." "What if it was not in His power?" "I could not believe in a God that could not stop what happened." "What if it was man and not God that did all of this?" "I do not believe in man, either.”

“I wanted to be empty like an overturned pitcher. But I was full like a stone.”

“As long as I am thinking, I am alive.”

“Your train ride appeased you?” I asked. “Oh, God,” he said, “twenty-six hours, fucking unbelievable.” This girl Unbelievable must be very majestic, I thought.”

“She took the posters downtown that afternoon. She filled a rolling suitcase with them ... she took a stapler. And a box of staples. And hope. I think of those things. The paper, the stapler, the staples, the tape, the hope. It makes me sick. Physical things. Forty years of loving someone becomes staples and hop.”

“We go on killing each other to no purpose! It is war waged by humanity against humanity, and it will only end when there's no one left to fight!”

“When you hide your face from the world, you can't see the world.”

“The center of me followed her, but I was left with the shell of me.”

“I can only hold on to the things I want to lose.”

“Our unspoken agreements led to disagreements, to suffering.”

“There are times when one needs to disappear while in the living room, and sometimes one simply wants to disappear.”

“I was pretending to be a monster, and I became a monster.”

“We just stood there, facing each other, but nine floors apart.”

“I got incredibly heavy boots about how relatively insignificant life is, and how, compared to the universe and compared to time, it didn't even matter if I existed at all.”

“We talked for hours, but we just kept repeating those same things over and over and over.”

“I had no need for the past, I thought, like a child. I did not consider that the past might have a need for me.”

“Whenever people cried themselves to sleep, the tears would all go to the same place, and in the morning the weatherman could report if the water level of the Reservoir of Tears had gone up or down, and you could know if New York was in heavy boots.”

“I ripped the page from my book - "I don't speak, I'm sorry." - and used it to dry her cheeks, my explanation and apology ran down her face like mascara.”

“She extended a hand that I didn't know how to take, so I broke its fingers with my silence.”

“I wanted to pull the thread, unravel the scarf of my silence and start again from the beginning.”

“Grief and loss are probably the most fearful creatures that exist. But loss shouldn't be a fearful creature. It should be a creature of wisdom. It should teach us not to fear that tomorrow may never come, but live fully, as though the hours are melting away like seconds. Loss should teach us to cherish those we love, to never do anything that will result in regret, and to cheer on tomorrow with all of its promises of greatness. It's easy and un-extraordinary to be frightened of life. It's far more difficult to arm yourself with the good stuff despite all the bad and step foot into tomorrow as an everyday warrior.”

“It might sound naive to suggest that whether you order a chicken patty or a veggie burger is a profoundly important decision. Then again, it certainly would have sounded fantastic if in the 1950's you were told that where you sat in a restaurant or on a bus could begin to uproot racism.”

“In the case of animal slaughter, to throw your hands in the air is to wrap your fingers around a knife handle.”

“I'm not better than anyone, and I'm not trying to convince people to live by my standards of what's right. I'm trying to convince them to live by their own.”

“The justifications for eating animals and for not eating them are often identical: we are not them.”

“Cruelty depends on an understanding of cruelty, and the ability to choose against it. Or to choose to ignore it.”

“What we forget about animals we begin to forget about ourselves.”

“There is something about eating animals that tends to polarize: never eat them or never sincerely question eating them; become an activist or disdain activists.”

“I thought he had to look for what he was looking for, and realize it no longer existed, or never existed." p. 233”

“What kind of world would we create if three times a day we activated our compassion and reason as we sat down to eat, if we had the moral imagination and the pragmatic will to change our most fundamental act of consumption?”

“The letter was destroyed, but its final paragraph is inside of me. She wrote, I wish I could be a girl again, with the 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. When I was your age, my grandfather gought me a ruby bracelet. It was too big for me and would slide up and down my arm. It was almost a necklace. He later told me that he had asked the jeweler to make it that way. Its size was supposed to be a symbol of his love. More rubies, more love. But I could not wear it comfortably. I could not wear it at all. So here is the point of everything I have been trying to say. If I were to give a bracelet to you, now, I would measure your wrist twice.”

“Googol?'' ''That's a one with one hundred zeroes after it.”

“I ripped the pages out of the book.I reversed the order, so the last one was first, and the first was last.When I flipped through them, it looked like the man was floating up through the sky.And if I'd had more pictures, he would've flown through a window, back into the building, and the smoke would've poured into the hole that the plane was about to come out of.Dad would've left his messages backward, until the machine was empty, and the plane would've flown backward away from him, all the way to Boston.He would've taken the elevator to the street and pressed the button for the top floor.He would've walked backward to the subway, and the subway would've gone backward through the tunnel, back to our stop.Dad would've gone backward through the turnstile, then swiped his Metrocard backward, then walked home backward as he read the New York Times from right to left.He would've spit coffee into his mug, unbrushed his teeth, and put hair on his face with a razor.He would've gotten back into bed, the alarm would've rung backward, he would've dreamt backward.Then he would've gotten up again at the end of the night before the worst day.He would've walked backward to my room, whistling 'I Am the Walrus' backward.He would've gotten into bed with me.We would've looked at the stars on my ceiling, which would've pulled back their light from our eyes.I'd have said 'Nothing' backward.He'd have said 'Yeah, buddy?' backward.I'd have said 'Dad?' backward, which would have sounded the same as 'Dad' forward.He would have told me the story of the Sixth Borough, from the voice in the can at the endto the beginning, from 'I love you' to 'Once upon a time.'We would have been safe.”

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

“What about guns with sensors in the handles that could detect if you were angry, and if you were, they wouldn't fire, even if you were a police officer?What about skyscrapers made with moving parts, so they could rearrange themselves when they had to, and even open holes in their middles for planes to fly through?”

“I went to the lobby and asked Stan what he knew about the person who lived in 6A. He said 'Never seen anyone go in or come out. Just a lot of deliveries and a lot of trash.''Cool'. He leaned down and whispered 'Haunted'.I whispered back 'I don't believe in the paranormal'.He said 'Ghosts don't care if you believe in them'.I walked back up the steps, this time past our floor and to the sixth. There was a mat in front of the door which said 'welcome' in twelve different languages. That didn't seem like something a ghost would put in front of his apartment."― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close”

“An ocean could not explain the distance we have traveled.”

“I'd left behind a thousand tons of marble, I could have released sculptures, I could have released myself from the marble of myself. I'd experienced joy, but not nearly enough, could there be enough?”

“I felt shame for living in a nation of unprecedented prosperity-a nation that spends a smaller percentage of income on food than any other civilization has in human history-but in the name of affordability treats the animals it eats with cruelty so extreme it would be illegal if inflicted on a dog.”

“In the emptiness of evenings, serious and unequivocal, he would say: “How beautiful is forgetting! what relief it would be for the world to lose some of its contents!”

“Usamos una serie de teatrales señascon las manos para comunicar lo que unsimple susurro habría hecho con lamisma eficacia. Pero hemos hecho votode silencio: ni una palabra hasta que estemos a salvo, de camino a casa.”

“I came to feel a certain kind of shame at the aquarium […] [T]here was a shame in being human: the shame of knowing that twenty of the roughly thirty-five classified species of sea horse worldwide are threatened with extinction because they are killed "unintentionally" in seafood production. The shame of indiscriminate killing for no nutritional necessity or political cause or irrational hatred or intractable human conflict. I felt shame in the deaths my culture justified by so thin a concern as the taste of canned tuna […] or the fact that shrimp make convenient hors d’oeuvres […] I felt shame for living in a nation of unprecedented prosperity--a nation that spends a smaller percentage of income on food than any other civilization has in human history--but in the name of affordability treats the animals it eats with cruelty so extreme it would be illegal if inflicted on a dog.”

“One day I wandered away from her and hid. I liked the way it felt to have someone look for me, to hear my name again and again. "Oskar! Oskar!" Maybe I didn't even like it, but I needed it right then.”