Quotes from Jonathan Safran Foer

She said, Do you have more things that you need, or more that you don't need? I said, It depends on what it means to need.

Something having been done just about everywhere just about always is no kind of justification for doing it now.

We burned with love for ourselves, all of us, starters of the fire we suffered- our love was the affliction for which only our love was the cure.

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

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?

Please be truthful, but also please be benevolent, please.

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

If it weren't my life, I wouldn't have believed it.

She was not crying Which surprised me very much But I understand now That she had found places For her melancholy That were behind more masks Than only her eyes

Love itself became the object of her love. She loved herself in love, she loved loving love, as love loves loving, and was able, in that way, to reconcile herself with a world that fell so short of what she would have hoped for.

She wrote, I wish I could be a girl again, with a 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.

Everything that's born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they're all on fire, and we're all trapped.

It made me start to wonder if there were other people so lonely so close. I thought about "Eleanor Rigby." It's true, where do they all come from? And where do they all belong?

We stopped laughing, I took the world into me, rearranged it, and sent it back out as a question: Do you like me?

I'd lost count of the disappointments.

I said, 'I need to know how he died.' He flipped back and pointed at, 'Why?' So I can stop inventing how he died. I'm always inventing.

I put my hand on the doorknob because I thought maybe her hand was on the doorknob on the other side.

Anyone who believes that a second is faster than a decade did not live life.

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 I do not do these things because we are family. I do them because they are common decencies. That is an idiom that the hero taught me. I do them because I am not a big fucking asshole. That is another idiom that the hero taught me.

I went to the guest room and pretended to write. I hit the space bar again and again and again. My life story was spaces.

I love sushi, I love fried chicken, I love steak. But there is a limit to my love

The paper, the stapler, the staples, the tape. It makes me sick. Physical things. Forty years of loving someone becomes staples and tape.

She died in my arms, saying, I don't want to die. That is what death is like. It doesn't matter what uniforms the soldiers are wearing. It doesn't matter how good the weapons are. I thought if everyone could see what I saw, we would never have war anymore.