Quotes from Jonathan Safran Foer

I hit the spacebar again and again and again. My life story was spaces.

The animals are those things that God likes but doesn't love.

My dream went all the way back to the beginning. The rain rose into the clouds, and the animals descended the ramp.

He was like a book that you could feel good holding, that you could talk about without ever having read, that could you recommend.

The world is a big place, he said, but so is the inside of an apartment!

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.

Books are for those without real lives, he thought. And they are no real replacement.

I kept thinking how they were all names of dead people, and how names are basically the only thing dead people keep.

Every night before putting her to sleep, Yankel counts her ribs, as if one might have disappeared in the course of the day and become the seed and soil for some new companion to steal her away from him.

Sometimes I wonder if she knows, I wonder in my Nothingest moments if she's testing me, if she types nonsense all day long, or types nothing at all, just to see what I'll do in response, 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.

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.

I dreamt four nights ago of clock hands descending from the universe like rain, of the moon as a green eye, of mirrors and insects, of a love that never withdrew. It was not the feeling of completeness that I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty.

If it had and answer, it wouldn't really be love, would it?

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.

It can be challenge enough to have to eat with myself.

All happy mornings resemble one another, as do all unhappy mornings, and that's at the bottom of what makes them so deeply unhappy: the feeling that this unhappiness has happened before, that efforts to avoid it will at best reinforce it, and probably even exacerbate it, that the universe is, for whatever inconceivable, unnecessary, and unjust reason, conspiring against the innocent sequence of clothes, breakfast, teeth and egregious cowlicks, backpacks, shoes, jackets, goodbye. Jacob

Because it was starting to get dark, and because the streets were crowded, I bumped into a googolplex people. Who were they? Where were they going? What were they looking for? I wanted to hear their heartbeats, and I wanted them to hear mine.

Before they had kids, if asked to conjure images of parenthood they would have said things like Reading in bed, and Giving a bath, and Running while holding the seat of a bicycle. Parenthood contains such moments of warmth and intimacy, but isn't them. It's cleaning up. The great bulk of family life involves no exchange of love, and no meaning, only fulfillment. Not the fulfillment of feeling fulfilled, but of fulfilling that which now falls to you.

She saw through the shell of me into the center of me

Flea-Market vendors are frozen mid-haggle. Middle-aged women are frozen in the middle of their lives. The gavels of frozen judges are frozen between guilt and innocence. On the ground are the crystals of the frozen first breaths of babies, and those of the last gasps of the dying.

We are breeding creatures incapable of surviving in any place other than the most artificial settings. We have focused the awesome power of modern genetic knowledge to bring into being animals that suffer more.

Was his death an essential stage in the continuation of his life?

Brod discovered 613 sadnesses, each perfectly unique, each a singular emotion, no more similar to any other sadness than to anger, ecstasy, guilt, or frustration. Mirror Sadness. Sadness of Domesticated Birds. Sadness of Being Sad in front of One's Parent. Humor Sadness. Sadness of Love Without Release.

Thanksgiving is the holiday that encompasses all others. All of them, from Martin Luther King Day to Arbor Day to Christmas to Valentine's Day, are in one way or another about being thankful.