Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

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.

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.

You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.

I'm sorry for my inability to let unimportant things go, for my inability to hold on to the important things.

He had a wall of masks from every country he‘d been to, like Armenia and Chile and Ethiopia. It‘s not a horrible world, he told me, but it‘s filled with a lot of horrible people.

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.

The only thing more painful than being an active forgetter is to be an inert rememberer.

She had fallen in love so many times that she began to suspect she was not falling in love at all, but doing something much more ordinary.

The secret was a hole in the middle of me that every happy thing fell into.

My friends are appeased to stay in Odessa for their entire lives. They are appeased to age like their parents, and become parents like their parents. They do not desire anything more than everything they have known.

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.

I don't think that there are any limits to how excellent we could make life seem.

If there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it walls, and we will furnish it with soft, red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweller's felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does.

You are the only one who has understood even a whisper of me, and I will tell you that I am the only person who has understood even a whisper of you.

I am doing something I hate for you. This is what it means to be in love.