writed by jonathan safran foer ♥

- Isn't it so weird how the number of dead people is increasing even though the earth stays the same size?

- It's not that I believe in things that can't be observed now, because I don't. It's that I believe that things are extremely complicated.

- Sometimes people who seem good end up being not as good as you might have hoped, you know?

- "Do you still love me?" / "I've never loved you more."

- "But if you don't tell me anything, how can I ever be right?" He circled something in an article and said, "Another way of looking at it would be, how could you ever be wrong?"

- If I'd been someone else in a different world I'd've done something different, but I was myself, and the world was the world, so I was silent(...)

- That secret was a hole in the middle of me that every happy thing fell into.

- "I hope you never love anything as much as I love you.

- We need much bigger pockets, I thought as I lay in bed, counting off the seven minutes that it takes a normal person to fall asleep. We need enormous pockets, pockets big enough for our families, and our friends, and even the people who aren't on our lists, people we've never met but still want to protect. We need pockets for boroughs and for cities, a pocket that could hold the universe. [Eight minutes thirty-two seconds...] But I knew that there couldn't be pockets that enormous. In the end, everyone loses everyone. There was no invention to get around that, and so I felt, that night, like the turtle that everything else in the universe was on top of.

- I want to tell you everything, without leaving out a single detail. But where is the beginning? And what is everything?

- I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love.

- 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.

- I did not need to know if he could love me. I needed to know if he could need me.

- I asked if he could think of a solution to that problem. "Which problem?" "The problem of how relatively insignificant we are."

- "Well, what would happen if a plane dropped you in the middle of the Sahara Desert and you picked up a single grain of sand with tweezers and moved it one millimeter?" I said, "I'd probably die of dehydration." He said, "I just mean right then, when you moved that single grain of sand. What would that mean?" I said, "I dunno, what?" He said, "Think about it." I thought about it. "I guess I would have moved a grain of sand." "Which would mean?" "Which would mean I moved a grain of sand?" "Which would mean you changed the Sahara." "So?" "So? So the Sahara is a vast desert. And it has existed for millions of years. And you changed it!" "That's true!" I said, sitting up. "I changed the Sahara!" "Which means?" he said. "What? Tell me." "Well, I'm not talking about painting the Mona Lisa or curing cancer. I'm just talking about moving that one grain of sand one millimeter." "Yeah?" "If you hadn't done it, human history would have been one way..." "Uh-huh?" "But you did do it, so...?" I stood on the bed, pointed my fingers at the fake stars, and screamed: "I changed the course of human history!"

- Sometimes you have to put your fears in order

- "I'm sure people tell you this constantly, but if you looked up 'incredibly beautiful' in the dictionary, there would be a picture of you." She cracked up a bit and said, "People never tell me that." "I bet they do." She cracked up a bit more. "They don't." "Then you hang out with the wrong people." "You might be right about that." "Because you're incredibly beautiful."

- I told her, "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 I would have given all of my collections, and all of the jewelry I'd ever made, and all future birthday and Christmas presents just to hear her say "Black Storage." Or "Blackwell Storage." Or "Blackman." Or even "Midnight Storage." Or "Dark Storage." Or "Rainbow." She made a weird face, like someone was hurting her, and said, "Store-a-Lot." I'd lost count of the disappointments.

- I knew I had to go home, I hated myself for going, why couldn't I be the kind of person who stays?

- (...) 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

- Just two days ago she said that her life story was happening faster than her life, "What do you mean?" I asked with my hands, "So little happens," she said, "and I'm so good at remembering." "You could write about the store?" "I've described every diamond in the case." "You could write about other people." "My life story is the story of everyone I've ever met." "You could write about your feelings." She asked, "Aren't my life and my feelings the same thing?"

- I'm sorry for my inability to let the unimportant things go, for my inability to hold on to the important things

- And what if I can't fall asleep without you?

- "I don't get in cars with strangers, and how did you know I was going to Manhattan?" He said, "We're not strangers, and I don't know how I knew." "Do you have an SUV?" "No." "Good. Do you have a gas-electric hybrid car?" "No." "Bad."

- So many people enter and leave your life! Hundreds of thousands of people! You have to keep the door open so they can come in! But it also means you have to let them go!

- "It's not a horrible world," he told me, putting a Cambodian mask on his face, "but it's filled with a lot of horrible people!"

- "Did you know that in the last 3,500 years there have been only 230 years of peace throughout the civilized world?" He said, "You tell me which 230 years and I'll believe you!" "I don't know which, but I know it's true." "And where's this civilized world you're referring to!"

- "Promise me you won't fall in love." "Why would you ask me to promise that?" "Either promise me you'll never fall in love again, or I'm going to stop loving you." "You're not being fair." "I don't have to be fair! I'm your son!"

- "Are you still mad at me?" "No." "Are you sure?" "I was never mad at you." "What were you?" "Hurt

- I miss you already, Oskar. 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.

- But there was always work to be done. We spent our lives making livings.

- 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.

- 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.

- I do not want to hurt you, he said by shaking his head left to right. It hurts me when you do not want to hurt me, I told him.

- Anyone who believes that a second is faster than a decade did not live my life.

- - 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 things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him. So I buried them, and let them hurt me.

- I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live, Oskar. Because if I were able to live my life again, I would do things differently. I would change my life.

- Years were passing through the spaces between moments.

- I told them, Go. All of you. Go. And they went. And they didn't come back.

- That is what death is like. It doesn't matter what uniforms the soldiers are wearing. It doesn't matter how good the weapons are. I thought if everyone could see what I saw, we would never have war anymore.

- "Maybe that's what a person's personality is: the difference between the inside and outside."

- ""No matter how much I feel, I'm not going to let it out. If I have to cry, I'm gonna cry on the inside. If I have to bleed, I'll bruise. If my heart starts going crazy, I'm not gonna tell everyone in the world about it. It doesn't help anything. It just makes everyone's life worse." "But if you're burying your feelings deep inside you, you won't really be you, will you?" "So?""

- You can't love anything more than something you miss.

- (...) we will love in a home with no walls, so that everywhere we go will be our home.

- I remember a single thought in my head: keep thinking. As long as I am thinking, I am alive (...) but know I am alive, and thinking is killing me.

- Life is scarier than death.

- I'm so afraid of losing something I love that I refuse to love anything.

- "Are you an optimist or a pessimist?" "I can't remember. Which?" "Do you know what those words mean?" "Not really." "An optimist is positive and hopeful. A pessimist is negative and cynical." "I'm an optimist."

"Well, that's good, because there's no irrefutable evidence. There's nothing that could convince someone who doesn't want to be convinced. But there is an abundance of clues that would give the wanting believer something to hold on to." "Like what?" "Like the peculiar fossil record of Central Park. Like the incongruous pH of the reservoir. Like the placement of certain tanks at the zoo, which correspond to the holes left by the gigantic hooks that pulled the park from borough to borough."

- I hope you never think about anything as much as I think about you.

- Forty years of loving someone becomes staples and tape.

- When I no longer had to be strong in front of you, I became very weak. I brought myself to the ground, which was where I belonged.

- When I looked at you, my life made sense. Even the bad things made sense. They were necessary to make you possible.

- But I knew the truth, and that's why I was so sad. Every moment before this one depends on this one. Everything in the history of the world can be proven wrong in one moment.

- All of my sounds were lock inside me;

- (...) and even if I couldn't, feeling pain is still better than not feeling, isn't it?

- I looked at everyone and wondered where they came from, and who they missed, and what they were sorry for

- (...) and then she put her hand over her mouth, like she was angry at herself for forgetting her sadness.

- "I can forgive you for leaving, but not for coming back"

- What's the point of a lie that doesn't protect anything?

- (...) it broke my heart into more pieces than my heart was made of.

- (...) my greatest regret is how much I believed in the future

- (...) wish I had known that I wasn't going to see Mr. Black again when we shook hands that afternoon. I wouldn't have let go. (...) but I didn't know (...) because you never know

- Because it was starting to get dark, and because the streets were crowded, I bumped into a googolplex people. Who were they? Where were they going? What were they looking for? I wanted to hear their heartbeats, and I wanted them to hear mine.

- "I wanted to hurt him." "Why?" "Because he had hurt me." "Why?" "Because people hurt each other. That's what people do." "It's not what I do." "I know."

- I wish I were a poet. I've never confessed that to anyone, and I'm confessing it to you, because you've given me reason to feel that I can trust you. I've spent my life observing the universe, mostly in my mind's eye. It's been a tremendously rewarding life, a wonderful life. I've been able to explore the origins of time and space with some of the great living thinkers. But I wish I were a poet.

- I wanted him to have good memories, so that maybe he would come back again one day. Or at least miss me.

- I think about all of the things I've done, Oskar. And all of the things I didn't do. The mistakes I've made are dead to me. But I can't take back the things I never did.

- I don't know if I've ever loved your grandfather. But I've loved not being alone.

- It's better to lose than never to have had.

- Things were happening around us, but nothing was happening between us.

- The night before I lost everything was like any other night.

- I had never told her how much I loved her. She was my sister. We slept in the same bed. There was never a right time to say it. It was always unnecessary. 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?(...) Here is the point of everything I have been trying to tell you, Oskar. It's always necessary. I love you .

- (...) just because you bury something, you don't really bury it.

- And then I wanted her to tell me that it was OK, because sometimes you have to do something bad to do something good.

- Maybe if we lived in a paperless society, which lots of scientists say we'll probably live in one day soon, Dad would still be alive (...) I reversed the order, so the last one was first, and the first was last. (...) Dad would've left his messages backward (...) We would have been safe.