Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

“She let out a laugh, and then she put her hand over her mouth, like she was angry at herself for forgetting her sadness.”

“Being with him made my brain quiet. I didn’t have to invent a thing.”

“The fragile balance depends on things we’ll never be able to see, hear, smell, taste, or touch. Life itself depends on them. ”

“Just because you’re an atheist, that doesn’t mean you wouldn’t love for things to have reasons for why they are.”

“If I’d been someone else in a different world I’d’ve done something different, but I was myself and the world was the world, so I was silent.”

“I have no need for the past, I thought, like a child. I did not consider that the past might have a need for me.”

″ I did not need to know if he could love me. I needed to know if he could need me.”

“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.”

“I like to see people reunited, maybe that’s a silly thing, but what can I say, I like to see people run into 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…”

“Literature was the only religion her father practiced, when a book fell on the floor he kissed it, when he was done with a book he tried to give it away to someone who would love it.”

“I thought that 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…”

“The meaning of my thoughts started to float away from me, like leaves that fall from a tree into a river, I was the tree, the world was the river.”

“Our laughter kept the feathers in the air. I thought about birds. Could they fly if there wasn’t someone, somewhere, laughing?”

“I’ve lived long enough to know I’m not one-hundred-percent anything.”

“She said, ‘There’s nothing wrong with not understanding yourself.’ ”

“Maybe that’s what a person’s personality is: the difference between the inside and the outside.”

“I thought, it’s a shame that we have to live, but it’s a tragedy that we get to live only one life, because if I’d had two lives, I would have spent one of them with her.”

“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!”

“That’s been my problem. I miss what I already have, and I surround myself with things that are missing.”

“When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog followed a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calendar that showed the wrong month. I cried over it…I spent my life learning to feel less.”

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

“Feeling pain is still better than not feeling, isn’t it?”

“What’s real? What isn’t real? Maybe those aren’t the right questions to be asking. What does life depend on? I wish I had made things for life to depend on. What if you never stop inventing? Maybe you’re not inventing at all.”

“I’m so afraid of losing something I love, that I refuse to love anything.”