Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes - Page 4

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

Highs and lows make you feel that things matter, but they're nothing.

Nine out of ten significant people have to do with money or war!

Because sometimes people who seem goodend up being not as good as you might have hoped.

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

Jonathan Safran Foer

What about a teakettle? What if the spout opened and closed when the steam came out, so it would become a mouth, and it could whistle pretty melodies, or do Shakespeare, or justcrack up with me? I could invent a teakettle that reads in Dad’s voice, so I could fall asleep, or maybe a set of kettles that sings the chorus of “Yellow Submarine,” which is a song by the Beatles, who I love, because entomology is one of my raisons d’être, which is a French expression that I know. Another good thing is that I could train my anus to talk when I farted. If I wanted to be extremely hilarious, I’d train it to say, “Wasn’t me!” every time I made an incredibly bad fart. And if I ever made an incredibly bad fart in the Hall of Mirrors, which is in Versailles, which is outside of Paris, which is in France, obviously, my anus would say, “Ce n’étais pas moi!”What about little microphones? What if everyone swallowed them, and they played the sounds of our hearts through little speakers, which could be in the pouches of our overalls? When you skateboard down the street at night you could hear everyone's heartbeat, and they could hear yours, sort of like sonar. One weird thing is, I wonder if everyone's hearts would start to beat at the same time, like how women who live together have their menstrual periods at the same time, which I know about, but don't really want to know about. That would be so weird, except that the place in the hospital where babies are born would sound like a crystal chandelier in a houseboat, because the babies wouldn't have had time to match up their heartbeats yet. And at the finish line at the end of the New York City Marathon it would sound like war.

Jonathan Safran Foer

I will describe my eyes and then begin the story. My eyes are blue and resplendent. Now I will begin the story.

Jonathan Safran Foer

Grandfather informs me that is not possible.

Jonathan Safran Foer

Anyway.I’m not allowed to watch TV, although I am allowed to rent documentaries that are approved for me, and I can read anything I want. My favorite book is A Brief History of Time, even though I haven’t actually finished it, because the math is incredibly hard and Mom isn’t good at helping me. One of my favorite parts is the beginning of the first chapter, where Stephen Hawking tells about a famous scientist who was giving a lecture about how the earth orbits the sun, and the sun orbits the solar system, and whatever. Then a woman in the back of the room raised her hand and said, “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” So the scientist asked her what the tortoise was standing on. And she said, “But it’s turtles all the way down!”I love that story, because it shows how ignorant people can be. And also because I love tortoises.

Jonathan Safran Foer

Succotash my cocker spaniel, you fudging crevasse-hole dipshiitake!

Jonathan Safran Foer

If we were to one day encounter a form of life more powerful and intelligent than our own, and it regarded us as we regard fish, what would be our argument against being eaten?

Jonathan Safran Foer

...people with nothing to declare carry the most.

Jonathan Safran Foer

I want an infinitely blank book and the rest of time......why didn't I learn to treat everything like it was the last time, my greatest regret is how much I believed in the future.

Jonathan Safran Foer

There's nothing wrong with not understanding yourself.

Jonathan Safran Foer

It has shown me that everything is illuminated in the light of the past. It is always along the side of us...on the inside, looking out.

Jonathan Safran Foer

She was like a drowning person, flailing, reaching for anything that might save her. Her life was an urgent, desperate struggle to justify her life.

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

I am always sad, I think. Perhaps this signifies that I am not sad at all, because sadness is something lower than your normal disposition, and I am always the same thing. Perhaps I am the only person in the world, then, who never becomes sad. Perhaps I am lucky.

Jonathan Safran Foer

I don't think that there are any limits to how excellent we could make life seem.

Jonathan Safran Foer

I'm sorry for my inability to let unimportant things go, for my inability to hold on to the important things.

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

It was not the feeling of completeness I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty.

Jonathan Safran Foer

Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.

Jonathan Safran Foer

(What are your ghosts like?)(They are on the insides of the lids of my eyes.)(This is also where my ghosts reside.)(You have ghosts?)(Of course I have ghosts.)(But you are a child.)(I am not a child.)(But you have not known love.)(These are my ghosts, the spaces amid love.)

Jonathan Safran Foer

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

Jonathan Safran Foer

He promised us that everything would be okay. I was a child, but I knew that everything would not be okay. That did not make my father a liar. It made him my father.

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

I went to a tattoo parlor and had YES written onto the palm of my left hand, and NO onto my right palm, what can I say, it hasn't made my life wonderful, its made life possible, when I rub my hands against each other in the middle of winter I am warming myself with the friction of YES and NO, when I clap my hands I am showing my appreciation through the uniting and parting of YES and NO, I signify "book" by peeling open my hands, every book, for me, is the balance of YES and NO, even this one, my last one, especially this one. Does it break my heart, of course, every moment of every day, into more pieces than my heart was made of, I never thought of myself as quiet, much less silent, I never thought about things at all, everything changed, the distance that wedged itself between me and my happiness wasn't the world, it wasn't the bombs and burning buildings, it was me, my thinking, the cancer of never letting go, is ignorance bliss, I don't know, but it's so painful to think, and tell me, 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

Brod's life was a slow realization that the world was not for her, and that for whatever reason, she would never be happy and honest at the same time. She felt as if she were brimming, always producing and hoarding more love inside her. But there was no release...So she had to satisfy herself with the idea of love--loving the loving of things whose existence she didn't care at all about. Love itself became the object of her love. She loved herself in love, she loved loving love, as love loves loving, and was able, in that way, to reconcile herself with a world that fell so short of what she would have hoped for. It was not the world that was the great and saving lie, but her willingness to make it beautiful and fair, to live a once-removed life, in a world once-removed from the one in which everyone else seemed to exist.

Jonathan Safran Foer

You are the only one who has understood even a whisper of me, and I will tell you that I am the only person who has understood even a whisper of you.

Jonathan Safran Foer

Every widow wakes one morning, perhaps after years of pure and unwavering grieving, to realize she slept a good night's sleep, and will be able to eat breakfast, and doesn't hear her husband's ghost all the time, but only some of the time. Her grief is replaced with a useful sadness. Every parent who loses a child finds a way to laugh again. The timbre begins to fade. The edge dulls. The hurt lessens. Every love is carved from loss. Mine was. Yours is. Your great-great-great-grandchildren's will be. But we learn to live in that love.

Jonathan Safran Foer

I wanted to tell her everything, maybe if I'd been able to, we could have lived differently, maybe I'd be there with you now instead of here. Maybe... if I'd said, 'I'm so afraid of losing something I love that I refuse to love anything,' maybe that would have made the impossible possible. Maybe, but I couldn't do it, I had buried too much too deeply inside me. And here I am, instead of there.

Jonathan Safran Foer

Why are you leaving me?He wrote, I do not know how to live.I do not know either but I am trying.I do not know how to try.There were some 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 bed that night I invented a special drain that would be underneath every pillow in New York, and would connect to the reservoir. Whenever people cried themselves to sleep, the tears would all go to the same place, and in the morning the weatherman could report if the water level of the Reservoir of Tears had gone up or down, and you could know if New York is in heavy boots.

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

Time was passing like a hand waving from a train I wanted to be on. I hope you never have to think about anything as much as I think about you.

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

Previous 1 2 3 4