Jonathan Safran Foer
American fiction writer.
When I was your age, my grandfather bought me a ruby bracelet. It was too big for me and would slide up and down my arm. It was almost a necklace. He later told me that he had asked the jeweler to make it that way. Its size was supposed to be a symbol of his love. More rubies, more love. But I could not wear it comfortably. I could not wear it at all. So here is the point of everything I have been trying to say. If I were to give a bracelet to you, now, I would measure your wrist twice.
It broke my heart into more pieces than my heart was made of, why can't people say what they mean at the time?
She spent the afternoon staring at their front door. "Waiting for someone?" Yankel asked. "What color is this?" He stood very close to the door, letting the end of his nose touch the peephole. He licked the wood and joked, "It certainly tastes like red." "Yes, it is red, isn't it?" "Seems so." She buried her head in her hands. "But couldn’t it be just a bit more red?" (pp. 79-80)
I put my hand on him. Touching him has always been important to me, it was something I lived for. I never could explain why. Little, nothing touches, my fingers against his shoulder, the outsides of our thighs touching as we squeeled together on the bus. I couldnt explain it, but I needed it. Sometimes I imagined stiching all of our little touches together. How many hundreds of thousands of fingers brushing against each other does it take to make love?
"I used to tuck her ... but now she tucked my feelings into the woven arteries of my veins."
There is nothing wrong with compromising, even if you are compromising almost everything.
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.
Time was passing like a hand waving from a train I wanted to be on. I hope you never think about anything as much as I think about you.
She died in my arms saying, "I don't want to die." That is what death is like. It doesn't matter what uniforms the soldiers are wearing. It doesn't matter how good the weapons are. I thought if everyone could see what I saw, we could never have war anymore.
I'm so afraid of losing something I love, that I refuse to love anything.
She wants to know if I love her, that's all anyone wants from anyone else, not love itself but the knowledge that love is there, like new batteries in the flashlight in the emergency kit in the hall closet.
"It's easy to be emotional. You can always make a scene... Highs and lows make you feel that things matter, but they're nothing." "So what's something?" "Being reliable is something. Being good."
I wanted to build walls around him, I wanted to separate inside from outside, I wanted to give him an infinitely long blank book and the rest of time.
Words never mean what we want them to mean.
"Stalin found out about the community and sent his thugs in, just a few days before I got there, to break all of their arms! That was worse than killing them! It was a horrible sight, Oskar: their arms in crude splints, straight in front of them like zombies! They couldn't feed themselves, because they couldn't get their hands to their mouths! So you know what they did!" "They starved?" "They fed each other! That's the difference between heaven and hell! In hell we starve! In heaven we feed each other!" I don't believe in the afterlife." "Neither do I, but I believe in the story."
My friends are appeased to stay in Odessa for their entire lives. They are appeased to age like their parents, and become parents like their parents. They do not desire anything more than everything they have known.
But more than that, no unloving words were ever spoken, and everything was held up as another small piece of proof that it can be this way, it doesn't have to be that way; if there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it heavy 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 jeweler's felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does.
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, my 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.
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!
He had a wall of masks from every country he‘d been to, like Armenia and Chile and Ethiopia. It‘s not a horrible world, he told me, but it‘s filled with a lot of horrible people.