Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

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?

I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others — The only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad.

The bruises go away, and so does how you hate, and so does the feeling that everything you receive from life is something you have earned.

Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does.

Every widow wakes one morning, perhaps after years of pure and unwavering grieving, to realize she slept a good night's sleep, and will be able to eat breakfast, and doesn't hear her husband's ghost all the time, but only some of the time. Her grief is replaced with a useful sadness. Every parent who loses a child finds a way to laugh again. The timbre begins to fade. The edge dulls. The hurt lessens. Every love is carved from loss. Mine was. Yours is. Your great-great-great-grandchildren's will be. But we learn to live in that love.

While it is always possible to wake a person who's sleeping, no amount of noise will wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.

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

She was like a drowning person, flailing, reaching for anything that might save her. Her life was an urgent, desperate struggle to justify her life.

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.

Why are you leaving me?
He wrote, I do not know how to live.
I do not know either but I am trying.
I do not know how to try.
There were some things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him. So i buried them and let them hurt me

Not responding is a response - we are equally responsible for what we don't do.

I never confused what I had with what I was.

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

I imagine a line, a white line, painted on the sand and on the ocean, from me to you.

With writing, we have second chances.