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
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
You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
There were 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
I’m so afraid of losing something I love that I refuse to love anything.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
It’s hard to say goodbye to the place you’ve lived. It can be as hard as saying goodbye to a person.
– 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
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!
– 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
Love me, because love doesn’t exist, and I have tried everything that does.
– 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
The only way to overcome sadness is to consume it.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
The more you love someone, he came to think, the harder it is to tell them. It surprised him that strangers didn’t stop each other on the street to say I love you.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
People who care about animals tend to care about people. They don’t care about animals to the exclusion of people. Caring is not a finite resource and, even more than that, it’s like a muscle: the more you exercise it, the stronger it gets.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
The end of suffering does not justify the suffering, and so there is no end to suffering.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
When I looked at you, my life made sense. Even the bad things made sense. They were necessary to make you possible.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
It’s true, I am afraid of dying. I am afraid of the world moving forward without me, of my absence going unnoticed, or worse, being some natural force propelling life on. Is it selfish? Am I such a bad person for dreaming of a world that ends when I do? I don’t mean the world ending with respect to me, but every set of eyes closing with mine.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
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
I felt suddenly shy. I was not used to shy. I was used to shame. Shyness is when you turn your head away from something you want. Shame is when you turn your head away from something you do not want.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
Being with him made my brain quiet. I didn’t have to invent a thing.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
If nothing matters, there’s nothing to save.
– 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
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
This is love, she thought, isn’t it? When you notice someone’s absence and hate that absence more than anything? More, even, than you love his presence?
– Jonathan Safran Foer
It was one of the best days of my life, a day during which I lived my life and didn’t think about my life at all.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
I am doing something I hate for you. This is what it means to be in love.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
I wanted to touch him, to tell him that even if everyone left everyone, I would never leave him, he talked and talked, his words fell through him, trying to find the floor to his sadness.
– 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
I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
I think and think and think, I’ve thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
I hated myself for going, why couldn’t I be the kind of person who stays?
– Jonathan Safran Foer
My life story is the story of everyone I’ve ever met.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
The only thing worse than being sad is for others to know you are sad.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
We often use technology to save time, but increasingly, it either takes the saved time along with it, or makes the saved time less present, intimate and rich. I worry that the closer the world gets to our fingertips, the further it gets from our hearts.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
I never confused what I had with what I was.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
You can’t love anything more than something you miss.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
I was more alone than if I had been alone.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
I can forgive you for leaving, but not for coming back.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
While it is always possible to wake a person who’s sleeping, no amount of noise will wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
The secret was a hole in the middle of me that every happy thing fell into.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
It was not the feeling of completeness I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
Songs are as sad as the listener.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
We had everything to say to each other, but no ways to say it.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
I did not need to know if he could love me.I needed to know if he could need me.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
People don’t care enough. They don’t get worked up enough. They don’t get angry enough. They don’t get passionate enough. I’d rather somebody hate what I do than be indifferent to it.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
The only thing more painful than being an active forgetter is to be an inert rememberer.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
There are two kinds of sculptures. There’s the kind that subtracts: Michelangelo starts with a block of marble and chips away. And then there is the kind that adds, building with clay, piling it on. The way I write novels is to keep piling on and piling on and piling on.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
My children not only inspired me to reconsider what kind of eating animal I would be, but also shamed me into reconsideration.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
I like to see people reunited, I like to see people run to each other, I like the kissing and the crying, I like the impatience, the stories that the mouth can’t tell fast enough, the ears that aren’t big enough, the eyes that can’t take in all of the change, I like the hugging, the bringing together, the end of missing someone.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
I feel too much. That’s what’s going on.’ ‘Do you think one can feel too much? Or just feel in the wrong ways?’ ‘My insides don’t match up with my outsides.’ ‘Do anyone’s insides and outsides match up?’ ‘I don’t know. I’m only me.’ ‘Maybe that’s what a person’s personality is: the difference between the inside and outside.’ ‘But it’s worse for me.’ ‘I wonder if everyone thinks it’s worse for him.’ ‘Probably. But it really is worse for me.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
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.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
I don’t think that there are any limits to how excellent we could make life seem.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
I missed you even when I was with you. That’s been my problem. I miss what I already have, and I surround myself with things that are missing.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
I hope you never think about anything as much as I think about you.
– 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
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
It’s a shame that we have to live, but it’s a tragedy that we get to live only one life.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
Why do beautiful songs make you sad?’ ‘Because they aren’t true.’ ‘Never?’ ‘Nothing is beautiful and true’.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
It’s the tragedy of loving, you can’t love anything more than something you miss.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
Just because you’re an atheist, that doesn’t mean you wouldn’t love for things to have reasons for why they are.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
There’s nothing wrong with not understanding yourself.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
With writing, we have second chances.
– Jonathan Safran Foer