Jessica > Jessica's Quotes

“Maybe the first time you saw her you were ten. She was standing in the sun scratching her legs. Or tracing letters in the dirt with a stick. Her hair was being pulled. Or she was pulling someone's hair. And a part of you was drawn to her, and a part of you resisted--wanting to ride off on your bicycle, kick a stone, remain uncomplicated. In the same breath you felt the strength of a man, and a self-pity that made you feel small and hurt. Part of you thought: Please don't look at me. If you don't, I can still turn away. And part of you thought: Look at me.”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“I want to say somewhere: I've tried to be forgiving. And yet. There were times in my life, whole years, when anger got the better of me. Ugliness turned me inside out. There was a certain satisfaction in bitterness. I courted it. It was standing outside, and I invited it in.”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“At the end, all that's left of you are your possessions. Perhaps that's why I've never been able to throw anything away. Perhaps that's why I hoarded the world: with the hope that when I died, the sum total of my things would suggest a life larger than the one I lived.”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“Once upon a time, there was a boy. He lived in a village that no longer exists, in a house that no longer exists, on the edge of a field that no longer exists, where everything was discovered, and everything was possible. A stick could be a sword, a pebble could be a diamond, a tree, a castle. Once upon a time, there was a boy who lived in a house across the field, from a girl who no longer exists. They made up a thousand games. She was queen and he was king. In the autumn light her hair shone like a crown. They collected the world in small handfuls, and when the sky grew dark, they parted with leaves in their hair.

Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“Part of me is made of glass, and also, I love you.”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“ONE THING I AM NEVER GOING TO DO WHEN I GROW UP
Is fall in love, drop out of college, learn to subsist on water and air, have a species named after me, and ruin my life.”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“She’s kept her love for him as alive as the summer they first met. In order to do this, she’s turned life away. Sometimes she subsists for days on water and air. Being the only known complex life-form to do this, she should have a species named after her. Once Uncle Julian told me how the sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti said that sometimes just to paint a head you have to give up the whole figure. To paint a leaf, you have to sacrifice the whole landscape. It might seem like you’re limiting yourself at first, but after a while you realize that having a quarter-of-an-inch of something you have a better chance of holding on to a certain feeling of the universe than if you pretended to be doing the whole sky.

My mother did not choose a leaf or a head. She chose my father. And to hold on to a certain feeling, she sacrificed the world.”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“Mom?" I said. She turned. "Can I talk to you about something?"
"Of course, darling. Come here."
I took a few steps into the room. There was so much I wanted to say.
"I need you to be --" I said, and then I started to cry.
"Be what?" she said, opening her arms.
"Not sad," I said.”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“The fear of death haunted me for a year. I cried whenever anyone dropped a glass or broke a picture. But even then that passed, I was left with a sadness that couldn't be rubbed off. It wasn't that something had happened. It was worse: I'd become aware of what had been with me all along without my notice. I dragged this new awareness around like a stone tied to my ankle. Wherever I went, it followed. I used to make up little sad songs in my head. I eulogized the falling leaves. I imagined my death in a hundred different ways, but the funeral was always the same: from somewhere in my imagination, out rolled a red carpet. Because after every secret death I died, my greatness was always discovered.”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer

“Why do beautiful songs make you sad?' 'Because they aren't true.' 'Never?' 'Nothing is beautiful and true.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“He awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounded and as impossible as it actually was, happy. And during the course of each day his heart would descend from his chest into his stomach. By early afternoon he was overcome by the feeling that nothing was right, or nothing was right for him, and by the desire to be alone. By evening he was fulfilled: alone in the magnitude of his grief, alone in his aimless guilt, alone even in his loneliness. I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others--the only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad. I am not sad. I am not sad. Because his life had unlimited potential for happiness, insofar as it was an empty white room. He would fall asleep with his heart at the foot of his bed, like some domesticated animal that was no part of him at all. And each morning he would wake with it again in the cupboard of his rib cage, having become a little heavier, a little weaker, but still pumping. And by the midafternoon he was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else. I am not sad.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

“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

“One day you will do things for me that you hate. That is what it means to be family.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

“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, Everything is Illuminated

“She had fallen in love so many times that she began to suspect she was not falling in love at all, but doing something much more ordinary.”
― 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, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“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, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“It was not the feeling of completeness I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

“I hated myself for going, why couldn't I be the kind of person who stays?”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“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, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“The secret was a hole in the middle of me that every happy thing fell into.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“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, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“There are only so many times that you can utter ‘It does not hurt’ before it begins to hurt even more than the hurt. You become enlightened of the feeling of feeling hurt, which is worse, I am certain, than the existent hurt.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer

“I thought, it's a shame that we have to live, but it's a tragedy that we get to live only one life, because if I'd had two lives, I would have spent one of them with her.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“Sometimes people who seem good end up being not as good as you might have hoped, you know?”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“We burned with love for ourselves, all of us, starters of the fire we suffered- our love was the affliction for which only our love was the cure.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer

“I loved having a dad who was smarter than the New York Times, and I loved how my cheek could feel the hairs on his chest through his T-shirt, and how he always smelled like shaving, even at the end of the day. Being with him made my brain quiet. I didn't have to invent a thing.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“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?”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close