Quotes from Jonathan Safran Foer

He knew that I love you also means I love you more than anyone else loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that no one else loves your, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that I love no one else, and never have loved anyone else, and never will love anyone else. He knew that it is, by love's definition, impossible to love two people.

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.

Everything else happened - why not the things that could have?

And you can't force someone to believe, not even with better and louder and more virtuous arguments, not even with irrefutable evidence

At the end of my dream, Eve put the apple back on the branch. The tree went back into the ground. It became a sapling, which became a seed.

I trust that you have a good purpose for your ignorance

What's so horrible about being dead forever, and not feeling anything, and not even dreaming? What's so great about feeling and dreaming?

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

He invented stories so fantastic she had to believe. Of cours, she was only a child, still removing the dust from her first death. What else could she do? And he was already accumulating the dust of his second death. What else could he do?

I thought maybe if she could express herself rather than suffer herself, if she had a way to relieve the burden, she lived for nothing more than living, with nothing to get inspired by, to care for, to call her own, she helped out at the store, then came home and sat in her big chair and stared at her magazines, not at them but through them, she let the dust accumulate on her shoulders.

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?

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

she cried and cried and cried, there weren't any napkins nearby so I ripped the page from the 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 (..)

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

Later that year, when snow started to hide the front steps, when morning became evening as I sat on the sofa, buried under everything I'd lost, I made a fire and used my laughter for kindling: Ha ha ha! Ha ha ha! Ha ha ha!

The end of suffering does not justify the suffering

Life overflows with imperfections, but some matter more than others

The important measurement is not the distance from unattainable perfection, but from unforgivable inaction.

She told him of ship voyages she had taken to places he had never heard of, and stories he knew were all untrue, were bad not-truths, even, but he nodded, and tried to convince himself to be convinced, tried to believe her, because he knew that the origin of the story is always an absence and he wanted to live among presences.

Rabbi, I feel no despair anymore. For seventy years I had only nightmares, but I have no nightmares anymore. I feel only gratitude for my life, for every moment I lived. Not only the good moments. I feel gratitude for every moment of my life. I have seen so many miracles.

I asked her, Are you an optimist or a pessimist? She looked at her watch and said, I'm optimistic. Then I have some bad news for you, because humans are going to destroy each others as soon as it becomes easy enough to, which will be very soon. Why do beautiful songs make you sad? Because they aren't true. Never? Nothing is beautiful and true. She smiled, but in a way that wasn't just happy, and said, You sound just like Dad.

Food for her is not food, it is terror, dignity, gratitude, vengeance, joyfulness, humiliation, religion, history, and, of course, love. As if the fruit she always offered us were picked from the destroyed brances of out family tree.

There is noting wrong with not understanding yourself.

It's true, I am afraid of dying. I am afraid of the world moving forward without me, of my absence going unnoticed, or worse, being some natural force propelling life on. Is it selfish? Am I such a bad person for dreaming of a world that ends when I do?