Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” Quotes (131 Quotes)

But I still couldn't figure out what it all meant. The more I found out, the less I understood.

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

It was getting hard to keep all the things I didn't know inside me.

The moment before he started was my favorite moment.

I am willing to be annoying if that's what was necessary.

I tried to think about other things. I tried to invent optimistic inventions. But the pessimistic ones were extremely loud.

My boots were so heavy that I was glad there was a column beneath us. How could such a lonely person have been living so close to me my whole life? If I had known, I would have gone up to keep him company.

We spent our lives making livings.

Also, I designed a pretty fascinating bracelet, where you put a rubber band around your favorite book of poems for a year, and then you take it off and wear it.

I hated myself for going, why couldn't I be the kind of person who stays?

I watched the sheets breathe when she breathed, like how Dad used to say that trees inhale when people exhale, because I was too young to understand the truth about biological processes.

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.

You have to do something bad to do something good.

Did she always have something to read in front of her so she wouldn't have to look at anything else?

I realized that your mother couldn't see the emptiness, she couldn't see anything...All of the words I'd written to her over all of those years, had I never said anything to hear at all?

It was terrible. All of the things we couldn't share. The room was filled with conversations we weren't having.

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

I believed him. I was not stupid. I was his wife.

I try not to remember the life that I didn't want to lose but lost and have to remember

My dream went all the way back to the beginning. The rain rose into the clouds, and the animals descended the ramp.

We talked about nothing in particular, but it felt like we were talking about the most important things...

And also, there are so many times when you need to make a quick escape, but humans don't have their own wings, or not yet, anyway, so what about a birdseed shirt?

I have so much to say to you. I want to begin at the beginning, because that is what you deserve. I want to tell you everything, without leaving out a single detail. But where is the beginning? And what is everything?

I wish my days could be washed away like the chalk lines of my days.

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!

Your dad didn't die, so I won't be able to explain it to you.

Do you have any coffee?'...'It stunts my growth, and I'm afraid of death.

I regret how much I believed in the future.

It was the first time I had ever made love. I wondered if he knew that. It felt like crying. I wondered, Why does anyone ever make love?

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