When I looked at you, my life made sense. Even the bad things made sense. They were
necessary to make you possible.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
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.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
Humans are the only animal that blushes, laughs, has religion, wages war, and kisses with
lips. So in a way, the more you kiss with lips, the more human you are.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
The mistakes I’ve made are dead to me. But I can’t take back the things I never did.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
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.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
So many people enter and leave your life! Hundreds of thousands of people! You have to
keep the door open so they can come in! But it also means you have to let them go!
– Jonathan Safran Foer
The only thing more painful than being an active forgetter is to be an inert rememberer.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
“Do you think I’m wonderful?” she asked him one day as they leaned against the trunk of a
petrified maple. “No,” he said. “Why? Because so many girls are wonderful. I imagine hundreds
of men have called their loves wonderful today, and it’s only noon. You couldn’t be something
that hundreds of others are.”
– Jonathan Safran Foer
– It’s easy to be emotional. You can always make a scene… Highs and lows make you feel
that things matter, but they’re nothing.
– So what’s something?
– Being reliable is something. Being good.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
That secret was a hole in the middle of me that every happy thing fell into.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
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 could never have war anymore.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand
for someone you love.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
I took the world into me, rearranged it, and sent it back out as a question: “Do you like me?”
– Jonathan Safran Foer
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.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
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.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
One day you will do things for me that you hate. That is what it means to be family.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
I like to see people reunited, I like to see people run to each other, I like the kissing and the
crying, I like the impatience, the stories that the mouth can’t tell fast enough, the ears that
aren’t big enough, the eyes that can’t take in all of the change, I like the hugging, the
bringing together, the end of missing someone.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
My life story is the story of everyone I’ve ever met.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
There is nothing wrong with compromising, even if you are compromising almost everything.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
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.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
There were things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him, so I buried them, and
let them hurt me.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
In the end, everyone loses everyone. There was no invention to get around that, and so I
felt, that night, like the turtle that everything else in the universe was on top of.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
Being with him made my brain quiet. I didn’t have to invent a thing.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
I love you also means I love you more than anyone loves you, or has loved you, or will love
you, and also, I love you in a way that no one loves you, 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.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
The only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
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.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
I never confused what I had with what I was.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
Time was passing like a hand waving from a train I wanted to be on. I hope you never think
about anything as much as I think about you.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
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.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
It’s the tragedy of loving, you can’t love anything more than something you miss.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
Accepting the compromise of the way we have been, the way we are, and the way we will
likely be… may we live together in unwavering love and good health, amen.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
I’m so afraid of losing something I love that I refuse to love anything.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
It feels like a moment I’ve lived a thousand times before, as if everything is familiar, right up
to the moment of my death, that it will happen again an infinite number of times, that we will
meet, marry, have our children, succeed in the ways we have, fail in the ways we have, all
exactly the same, always unable to change a thing. I am again at the bottom of an
unstoppable wheel, and when I feel my eyes close for death, as they have and will a
thousand times, I awake.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
I don’t think that there are any limits to how excellent we could make life seem.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
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.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
I imagine a line, a white line, painted on the sand and on the ocean, from me to you.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
This is love, she thought, isn’t it? When you notice someone’s absence and hate that
absence more than anything? More, even, than you love his presence?
– Jonathan Safran Foer