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. Table, ivory elephant charm, rainbow, onion, hairdo, mollusk, Shabbos, violence, cuticle, melodrama, ditch, honey, doily… None of it moved her. She addressed her world honestly, searching for something deserving of the volumes of love she knew she had within her, but to each she would have to say, I don’t love you. Bark-brown fence post: I don’t love you. Poem too long: I don’t love you. Physics, the idea of you, the laws of you: I don’t love you. Nothing felt like anything more than what it actually was. Everything was just a thing, mired completely in its thingness.


Jonathan Safran Foer

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If we were to one day encounter a form of life more powerful and intelligent than our own, and it re...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
Only a few months into our marriage, we started marking off areas in the apartment as "Nothing Place...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
People around the world were moving from one place to another. No one was staying.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
Every widow wakes one morning, perhaps after years of pure and unwavering grieving, to realize she s...
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 pa...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
People care about animals. I believe that. They just don’t want to know or to pay. A fourth of all...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
If limousines were extremely long, they wouldn't need drivers. You could just get in the back seat, ...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
Are you an optimist or a pessimist?"
"I can't remember. Which?"
"Do you know what those ...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
I don't think that there are any limits to how excellent we could make life seem.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
He looked so much like me, I could tell that he saw it, too, we shared the smile of recognizing ours...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
And so it was when anyone tried to speak: their minds would become tangled in remembrance. Words bec...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
Memories are small prayers to God, if we believed in that sort of thing.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
Memory was supposed to fill the time, but it made time a hole to be filled.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
Parents are always more knowledgeable than their children, and children are always smarter than thei...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
The end of the world has come often, and continues to come.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
If we communicated with something like music, we would never be misunderstood, because there is noth...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
Everything is to protect you. I exist in case you need to be protected.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
She has become an expert at confusing what is with what was with what should be...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
The only way to overcome sadness is to consume it.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
SADNESS OF THE INTELLECT: Sadness of being misunderstood [sic]; Humor sadness; Sadness...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder.
Everything moved me. A do...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
I am doing something I hate for you. This is what it means to be in love.
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...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
The bruises go away, and so does how you hate, and so does the feeling that everything you receive f...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
The only thing more painful than being an active forgetter is to be an inert rememberer.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convinc...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
I am always sad, I think. Perhaps this signifies that I am not sad at all, because sadness is someth...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
The more you love someone, he came to think, the harder it is to tell them. It surpris...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
This is love, she thought, isn't it? When you notice someone's absence and hate that absence more th...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
One day you will do things for me that you hate. That is what it means to be family.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
I often think about how my sons will come to know about September 11th. Something overheard? A newsp...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
Mom told me, “It probably gets pretty lonely to be Grandma, don’t you think?” I told her, “I...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
She let out a laugh, and then she put her hand over her mouth, like she was angry at herself for for...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
I said, I want to tell you something.
She said, you can tell me tomorrow.
I had never told...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
Words never mean what we want them to mean.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
I knew that our time together was almost over, I asked her if she liked sports, she asked me if I li...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
We slept in the same bed.
There was never a right time to say it.
It was always unnecessar...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
In the end, everyone loses everyone. There was no invention to get around that, and so I felt, that ...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
It's the tragedy of loving, you can't love anything more than something you miss.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
Anyone who believes that a second is faster than a decade did not live life.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
Touching him was always so important to me. It was something I lived for. I never could explain why....
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
Being reliable is something. Being good.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
You can't love anything more than something you miss.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
You only get to keep what you refuse to let go of.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
I'm less worried about accomplishment - as younger people always can't help but be - and mor...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
From space, astronauts can see people making love as a tiny speck of light. Not light, exactly, but ...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
Anyway.
I’m not allowed to watch TV, although I am allowed to rent documentaries that are app...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
I have made my own choice, which is vegetarianism, but it's not the choice I'm imposing on a...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
The kind of funny irony is that a lot of people talk about ethical meat eating as if it's a way ...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
It's rarely talked about, but hunting for sport is just about as vile as we humans get.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
I read the first chapter of A Brief History of Time when Dad was still alive, and I got incredibly h...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
It has shown me that everything is illuminated in the light of the past. It is always along the side...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
My children not only inspired me to reconsider what kind of eating animal I would be, but also shame...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
...and when is enough proof enough?
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
E allora quanta sofferenza è accettabile? È questa la base di tutto, ed è questo che ognuno di no...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
My greatest fear is feeling like a professional novelist. Somebody who creates characters, who sits ...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
Jacob wrestled with God for the blessing. He wrestled with Esau for the blessing. He wrestled with I...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
God loves the plagiarist. And so it is written, 'God created humankind in His image, in the image of...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
...This is a kiss. It is what happens when lips are puckered and pressed against something, sometime...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
It made me start to wonder if there were other people so lonely so close. I thought about “Eleanor...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
I wanted to cry but I didn't, I probably should have cried, I should have drowned us there in the ro...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
What's so horrible about being dead forever, and not feeling anything, and not even dreaming? What's...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
Does it break my heart, of course, every moment of every day, into more pieces than my heart was mad...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
I went to my grandmother, your great-great-grandmother, and asked her to write a letter. She was my ...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
Writing's funny, it's like walking down a hall in the dark looking for the light switch, and suddenl...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
Two friends are ordering lunch. One says, 'I'm in the mood for a burger,' and orders it. The other s...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
A map such as that one is worth many hundreds, and as luck will have it, thousands of dollars. But m...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
At the end of my dream, Eve put the apple back on the branch. The tree went back into the ground. It...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
The letter was destroyed, but its final paragraph is inside of me. She wrote, I wish I could be a gi...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
This is the sixty-nine,” I told him,
presenting the magazine in front of him. I put my finger...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
Puoi levarti anche le calze?" Gli chiedeva lei. "E i calzoni?"
"E tu ti puoi levare i tuoi?" JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
THE PROBLEM OF GOOD: WHY UNCONDITIONALLY GOOD THINGS HAPPEN TO UNCONDITIONALLY BAD PEOPLE
(SEE ...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
I will walk without noise and I will open the door in darkness and I will
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
He awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as sim...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
I have been waiting for you for so long.”
I pointed to the car. “We are searching for Trach...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
Our love was the affliction for which only our love was the cure.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER