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

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. And the more you wage war.

I tried the key in all the doors, even though he said he didn't recognize it. It's not that I didn't trust him, becuase I did. It's that at the end of my search I wanted to be able to say: I don't know how I could have tried harder.

Mr. Black started singing a song in some weird language, which I guess was Philippinish.

We need much bigger pockets I thought as I lay in my bed counting off the seven minutes that it takes a normal person to fall asleep. We need enormous pockets pockets big enough for our families and our friends and even the people who aren't on our lists people we've never met but still want to protect. We need pockets for borough and for cities a pocket that could hold the universe.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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...