Janice > Janice's Quotes

“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, Everything Is Illuminated

“You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.”
― 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, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“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”
― Jonathan Safran Foer

“We slept in the same bed.
There was never a right time to say it.
It was always unnecessary.
The books in my father's shed were sighing.
The sheets were rising and falling around me with Anna's breathing.
I thought about waking her.
but it was unnecessary.
There would be other nights.
And how can you say I love you to someone you love?
I rolled onto my side and fell asleep next to her.
Here is the point of everything I have been trying to tell you...
It's always necessary.
I love you,...”
― Jonathan Safran Foer

“I took the world into me, rearranged it, and sent it back out as a question: "Do you like me?”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“Sometimes I imagined stitching all of our little touches together. How many hundreds of thousands of fingers brushing against each other does it take to make love? Why does anyone ever make love?”
― 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, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“I felt, that night, on that stage, under that skull, incredibly close to everything in the universe, but also extremely alone. I wondered, for the first time in my life, if life was worth all the work it took to live. What exactly made it worth it? What's so horrible about being dead forever, and not feeling anything, and not even dreaming? What's so great about feeling and dreaming?”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“I spent my life learning to feel less. Every day I felt less. Is that growing old? Or is it something worse? You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.”
― 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, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“SADNESS OF THE INTELLECT: Sadness of being misunderstood [sic]; Humor sadness; Sadness of love wit[hou]t release; Sadne[ss of be]ing smart; Sadness of not knowing enough words to [express what you mean]; Sadness of having options; Sadness of wanting sadness; Sadness of confusion; Sadness of domes[tic]ated birds, Sadness of fini[shi]ng a book; Sadness of remembering; Sadness of forgetting; Anxiety sadness...”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

“But what she was really trying to say was this: I like music better than anything in the world, after you.”
― Foer

“Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.”
― Zadie Smith , White Teeth

“Still though, I think if you're not self-obsessed, you're probably boring.”
― Dave Eggers

“Why do you want to be on The Real World?
-Because I want everyone to witness my youth

Why?
-Isn't it gorgeous?”
― Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

“We are the bright new stars born of a screaming black hole, the nascent suns burst from the darkness, from the grasping void of space that folds and swallows--a darkness that would devour anyone not as strong as we. We are oddities, sideshows, talk show subjects. We capture everyone's imagination.”
― Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

“All we really want is for no one to have a boring life, to be impressive, so we can be impressed. ~ on the friends we choose.”
― Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

“I see colors like you hear jet planes.”
― Dave Eggers, How We Are Hungry

“If you don't want anyone to know about your existence, you might as well kill yourself. You're taking up space, air.”
― Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

“I had the sensation that I might always be running like this, that I would always have to run, and that I would always be able to run.”
― Dave Eggers, What Is the What

“You never get over it, but you get to where it doesn't bother you so much.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words.
I don't believe in "sadness", "joy", or "regret".
Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that is oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.”
― Virginia Woolf

“I hate when people ask what a book is about. People who read for plot, people who suck out the story like the cream filling in an Oreo, should stick to comic strips and soap operas. . . . Every book worth a damn is about emotions and love and death and pain. It's about words. It's about a man dealing with life. Okay?”
― J.R. Moehringer

“Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?”
― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

“Nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“I'd rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints.”
― Billy Joel