Maribel > Maribel's Quotes

“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

“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, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“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

“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, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“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

“Humans are the only animal that blushes, laughs, has religion, wages war, and kisses with lips. So in a way, the more you kiss with lips, the more human you are. And the more you wage war.”
― 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

“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.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

“Being with him made my brain quiet. I didn't have to invent a thing.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer

“When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder.
Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calendar that showed the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did. Where the smoke from a chimney ended. How an overturned bottle rested at the edge of a table.
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, Everything Is Illuminated

“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

“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.”
― 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

“It broke my heart into more pieces than my heart was made of, why can't people say what they mean at the time?”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“I hope you never think about anything as much as I think about you.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“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

“We talked about nothing in particular, but it felt like we were talking about the most important things...”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“I have so much to say to you. I want to begin at the beginning, because that is what you deserve. I want to tell you everything, without leaving out a single detail. But where is the beginning? And what is everything?”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“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, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“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, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“It was terrible. All of the things we couldn't share. The room was filled with conversations we weren't having.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“We had the stars, you and I. And this is given once only.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“I suddenly realized that we were on borrowed time, that time is always borrowed, and that the lending agency exacts its premium precisely when we are least prepared to pay and need to borrow more...”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name