By Jonathan Safran Foer

• Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living
• I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live
• I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love
• There were things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him. So I buried them, and let them hurt me
• 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
• We had everything to say to each other, but no ways to say it
• 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 hope you never think about anything as much as I think about you
• She let out a laugh, and then she put her hand over her mouth, like she was angry at herself for forgetting her sadness
• It broke my heart into more pieces than my heart was made of, why can't people say what they mean at the time?
• If it had and answer, it wouldn't really be love, would it?
• I looked at everyone and wondered where they came from, and who they missed, and what they were sorry for
• I wanted to protect him, which I was sure I could do, even if I could not protect myself
• I got incredibly heavy boots about how relatively insignificant life is, and how, compared to the universe and compared to time, it didn't even matter if I existed at all
• I was pretending to be a monster, and I became a monster
• 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 hated myself for going, why couldn't I be the kind of person who stays?
• 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
• You can't love anything more than something you miss
• Mom told me, “It probably gets pretty lonely to be Grandma, don’t you think?” I told her, “It probably gets pretty lonely to be anyone."
• I wanted to cry but I didn't, I probably should have cried, I should have drowned us there in the room ending our suffering
• I was more alone than if I had been alone
• It was terrible. All of the things we couldn't share. The room was filled with conversations we weren't having
• She extended a hand that I didn't know how to take, so I broke its fingers with my silence
• I would have done anything for him. Maybe that was my sickness