Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes That Will Inspire You to Live Your Best Life

1. ...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. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

2. 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. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

3. Because sometimes people who seem goodend up being not as good as you might have hoped. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

4. 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.

5. 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. Everything is Illuminated

6. 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? Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

7. Grandfather informs me that is not possible.

8. 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. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

9. Highs and lows make you feel that things matter, but they're nothing. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

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

11. I imagine a line, a white line, painted on the sand and on the ocean, from me to you. Everything is Illuminated

12. I think and think and think, I‘ve thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.

13. 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. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

14. 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.

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

16. 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. Everything Is Illuminated

17. 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. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

18. Nine out of ten significant people have to do with money or war! Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

19. She let out a laugh, and then she put her hand over her mouth, like she was angry at herself for forgetting her sadness. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

20. Succotash my cocker spaniel, you fudging crevasse-hole dipshiitake! Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

21. 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. Everything is Illuminated

22. There are worse things, worse than being like us. Look, at least we're alive. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

23. 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.

24. 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

25. 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. Everything is Illuminated

26. You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.

27. Anyone who believes that a second is faster than a decade did not live life. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

28. Find a printer paper and imagine a full-grown bird shaped something like a football with legs standing on it. Imagine 33,000 of these rectangles in a grid. (Broilers are never in cages, and never on multiple levels.) Now enclose the grid with windowless walls and put a ceiling on top. Run in automated (drug-laced) feed, water, heating, and ventilation systems. This is a farm. Eating Animals

29. From space, astronauts can see people making love as a tiny speck of light. Not light, exactly, but a glow that could be confused for light - a coital radiance that takes generations to pour like honey through the darkness to the astronaut's eyes.In about one and a half centuries - after the lovers who made the glow will have long since been laid permanently on their backs - the metropolitan cities will be seen from space. They will glow all year. Smaller cities will also be seen, but with great difficulty. Towns will be virtually impossible to spot. Individual couples invisible. Everything Is Illuminated

30. Needless to say, jamming deformed, drugged, overstressed birds together in a filthy, waste-coated room is not very healthy. Beyond deformities, eye damage, blindness, bacterial infections of bones, slipped vertebrae, paralysis, internal bleeding, anemia, slipped tendons, twisted lower legs and necks, respiratory diseases, and weakened immune systems are frequent and long-standing problems on factory farms. Eating Animals