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

Even if I don't like what I am, I know what I am. My children like what they are, but they don't know what they are. So tell me which is worse.

I flipped back through the pad of paper while I thought about what Stephen Hawking would do next.

I shook my tambourine the whole time, because it helped me remember that even though I was going through different neighborhoods, I was still me.

I wasn't having second thoughts, but I was having thoughts.

It's hard to say goodbye to the place you've lived. It can be as hard as saying goodbye to a person.

She said I could have a seat on the couch if I wanted to, but I told her I didn't believe in leather, so I stood.

Then I have some bad news for you, because humans are going to destryo each other as soon as it becomes easy enough to, which will be very soon.

Years were passing through the spaces between moments.

A few weeks after the worst day, I started writing lots of letters. I don't know why, but it was one of the only things that made my boots lighter.

Every moment before this one depends on this one.

I got tired, I told him. Not worn out, but worn through. Like one of those wives who wakes up one morning and says I can't bake any more bread.

I spent my life learning to feel less. Every day I felt less. Is that growing old? Or something worse?

I wasn't trying to invent better and better homes, but to show her that homes didn't matter, we could live in any home, in any city, in any country, in any century, and be happy, as if the world were just what we lived in.

Its so painful to think, and tell me what did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever get me?

She wanted more, more slang, more figures of speech, the bee's knees, the cats pajamas, horse of a different color, dog-tired, she wanted to talk like she was born here, like she never came from anywhere else

There are worse things, worse than being like us. Look, at least we're alive.

You could bury people one hundred floors down, and a whole dead world could be underneath the living one.

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.

Feathers filled the small room. Our laughter kept the feathers in the air. I thought about birds. Could they fly is there wasn't someone, somewhere, laughing?

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

I started carrying blank books like this one around, which I would fill with all the things I couldn't say...

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.

I've thought myself out of happinessone one million times, but never once into it.

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.

There is nothing wrong with compromising. Even if you compromise almost everything.

You have to do something bad to do something good.

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?

Flea-Market vendors are frozen mid-haggle. Middle-aged women are frozen in the middle of their lives. The gavels of frozen judges are frozen between guilt and innocence. On the ground are the crystals of the frozen first breaths of babies, and those of the last gasps of the dying.

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 thought about all of the things that everyone ever says to each other, and how everyone is going to die, whether it's in a millisecond, or days, or months, or 76.5 years, if you were just born. Everything that's born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they're all on fire, and we're all trapped.