Jonathan Safran Foer · 326 pages
Rating: (336.7K votes)
“Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, quote from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
“Why didn't I learn to treat everything like it was the last time. My greatest regret was how much I believed in the future.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, quote from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
“I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, quote from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
“I like to see people reunited, I like to see people run to each other, I like the kissing and the crying, I like the impatience, the stories that the mouth can't tell fast enough, the ears that aren't big enough, the eyes that can't take in all of the change, I like the hugging, the bringing together, the end of missing someone.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, quote from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
“I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, quote from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
“Why do beautiful songs make you sad?' 'Because they aren't true.' 'Never?' 'Nothing is beautiful and true.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, quote from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
“There were things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him. So I buried them, and let them hurt me.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, quote from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
“I feel too much. That's what's going on.' 'Do you think one can feel too much? Or just feel in the wrong ways?' 'My insides don't match up with my outsides.' 'Do anyone's insides and outsides match up?' 'I don't know. I'm only me.' 'Maybe that's what a person's personality is: the difference between the inside and outside.' 'But it's worse for me.' 'I wonder if everyone thinks it's worse for him.' 'Probably. But it really is worse for me.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, quote from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
“She wants to know if I love her, that's all anyone wants from anyone else, not love itself but the knowledge that love is there, like new batteries in the flashlight in the emergency kit in the hall closet.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, quote from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
“Songs are as sad as the listener.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, quote from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
“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!”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, quote from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
“Humans are the only animal that blushes, laughs, has religion, wages war, and kisses with lips. So in a way, the more you kiss with lips, the more human you are. And the more you wage war.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, quote from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
“My life story is the story of everyone I've ever met.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, quote from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
“What about little microphones? What if everyone swallowed them, and they played the sounds of our hearts through little speakers, which could be in the pouches of our overalls? When you skateboarded down the street at night you could hear everyone's heartbeat, and they could hear yours, sort of like sonar. One weird thing is, I wonder if everyone's hearts would start to beat at the same time, like how women who live together have their menstrual periods at the same time, which I know about, but don't really want to know about. That would be so weird, except that the place in the hospital where babies are born would sound like a crystal chandelier in a houseboat, because the babies wouldn't have had time to match up their heartbeats yet. And at the finish line at the end of the New York City Marathon it would sound like war.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, quote from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
“I missed you even when I was with you. That’s been my problem. I miss what I already have, and I surround myself with things that are missing.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, quote from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
“We had everything to say to each other, but no ways to say it”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, quote from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
“We need enormous pockets, pockets big enough for our families and our friends, and even the people who aren't on our lists, people we've never met but still want to protect. We need pockets for boroughs and for cities, a pocket that could hold the universe.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, quote from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
“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.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, quote from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
“I hated myself for going, why couldn't I be the kind of person who stays?”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, quote from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
“In bed that night I invented a special drain that would be underneath every pillow in New York, and would connect to the reservoir. 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 is in heavy boots.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, quote from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
“I felt suddenly shy. I was not used to shy. I was used to shame. Shyness is when you turn your head away from something you want. Shame is when you turn your head away from something you do not want.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, quote from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
“Just because you're an atheist, that doesn't mean you wouldn't love for things to have reasons for why they are.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, quote from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
“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.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, quote from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
“I felt, that night, on that stage, under that skull, incredibly close to everything in the universe, but also extremely alone. I wondered, for the first time in my life, if life was worth all the work it took to live. What exactly made it worth it? What's so horrible about being dead forever, and not feeling anything, and not even dreaming? What's so great about feeling and dreaming?”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, quote from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
“The mistakes I've made are dead to me. But I can't take back the things I never did.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, quote from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
“I took the world into me, rearranged it, and sent it back out as a question: "Do you like me?”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, quote from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
“I never confused what I had with what I was.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, quote from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
“The secret was a hole in the middle of me that every happy thing fell into.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, quote from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
“Feathers filled the small room. Our laughter kept the feathers in the air. I thought about birds. Could they fly if there wasn't someone, somewhere, laughing?”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, quote from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
“I wanted to touch him, to tell him that even if everyone left everyone, I would never leave him, he talked and talked, his words fell through him, trying to find the floor to his sadness.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, quote from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Jonathan Safran Foer
Born place: in Washington, D.C., The United States
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“To live in a city, one must be larger than one's environment or enjoy belonging to the crowd.”
― Louis L'Amour, quote from The Lonesome Gods
“For states in demographic decline with ever more lavish social programs, the question is a simple one: Can they get real? Can they grow up before they grow old? If not, then they'll end their days in societies dominated by people with a very different worldview.”
― Mark Steyn, quote from America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It
“ideologically fascist and progressive totalitarianism was never a mere doctrine of statism. Rather, it claimed that the state was the natural brain of the organic body politic.”
― Jonah Goldberg, quote from Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning
“She was so intelligent that she could think herself into beauty. Intelligence...they don't talk about it much, the poets, but when a woman is intelligent and passionate and good...”
― Eva Ibbotson, quote from A Company of Swans
“A man of the present day, whether he believes in the divinity of Christ or not, cannot fail to see that to assist in the capacity of tzar, minister, governor, or commissioner in taking from a poor family its last cow for taxes to be spent on cannons, or on the pay and pensions of idle officials, who live in luxury and are worse than useless; or in putting into prison some man we have ourselves corrupted, and throwing his family on the streets; or in plundering and butchering in war; or in inculcating savage and idolatrous superstitious in the place of the law of Christ; or in impounding the cow found on one's land, though it belongs to a man who has no land; or to cheat the workman in a factory, by imposing fines for accidentally spoiled articles; or making a poor man pay double the value for anything simply because he is in the direst poverty;--not a man of the present day can fail to know that all these actions are base and disgraceful, and that they need not do them. They all know it. ”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from The Kingdom of God Is Within You
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