Jonathan Safran Foer I Quotations

Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.

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.

I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live.

I'm a novelist, I'm not an activist. I'm not a non-fiction writer, I'm not a journalist. I'm not a foodie, I'm not even really an animal person, or an environmentalist. I did the best I could with this, but it's not who I am.

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.

It's the tragedy of loving, you can't love anything more than something you miss.

I realized I was on a something island. 'How did I get here,' I wondered, surrounded by Nothing, "and how can I get back?

I can only hold on to the things I want to lose.

And she would say, "Today you believe in God?" And he would say, "Today I believe in love".

I am doing something I hate for you. This is what it means to be in love.

[…] but I believe that things are extremely complicated, and her looking over me was as complicated as anything could ever be. But it was also incredibly simple.

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.

I regret how much I believed in the future.