(Jonathan Safran Foer)

• What about little microphones? What if everyone swallowed them, and they played the sounds of our hearts through little speakers which could be in the pouches of our overalls? When you skateboarded down the street at night you could hear everyone's heartbeat, and they could hear yours, sort of like sonar. One weird thing is, I wonder if everyone's hearts would start to beat at the same time, like how women who live together have their menstrual periods at the same time, which I know about, but don't really want to know about. That would be so weird, except that the place in the hospital where babies are born would sound like a crystal chandelier in a houseboat, because the babies wouldn't have had time to match up their heartbeats yet. And at the finish line at the end of the New York City Marathon it would sound like war. (pg.1 )
• "Parents are always more knowledgeable than their children, and children are always smarter than their parents." (pg. 7)
• "And" was the next word I lost, probably because it was so close to her name, what a simple word to say, what a profound word to lose. (pg. 16)
• The meaning of my thoughts started to float away from me, like leaves that fall from a tree into a river, I was the tree, the world was the river. (pg. 16)
• Does it break my heart, of course, every moment of every day, into more pieces than my heart was made of, I never thought of myself as quiet, much less silent, I never thought about things at all. (pg. 17)
• I'd experienced joy, but not nearly enough, could there be enough? The end of suffering does not justify the suffering, and so there is no end to suffering. (pg. 33)
• "Why do beautiful songs make you sad?" "Because they aren't true." "Never?" "Nothing is beautiful and true." (pg. 43)
• 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." (pg. 69)
• The secret was a hole in the middle of me that every happy thing fell into. (pg. 71)
• 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. (pg. 73-74)
• 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. (pg. 79)
• Sometimes people who seem good end up being not as good as you might have hoped. (pg. 100)
• It's a rule that we never listen to sad music, we made that rule early on, songs are as sad as the listener, we hardly ever listen to music. (pg. 108)
• I like to see people reunited, maybe that's a silly thing, but what can I say, 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. (pg. 109)
• It wasn't until last night, our last night together, that the inevitable question finally arose, I told her, "Something," by covering her face with my hands and then lifting them like a marriage veil. "We must be." But I knew, in the most protected part of my heart, the truth. (pg. 111)
• Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living. (pg. 113)
• She went home with her father, the center of me followed her, but I was left with the shell of me, I needed to see her again, I couldn't explain my need to myself, and that's why it was such a beautiful need, there's nothing wrong with not understanding yourself. (pg. 113-114)
• Literature was the only religion her father practiced, when a book fell on the floor he kissed it, when he was done with a book he tried to give it away to someone who would love it, and if he couldn't find a worthy recipient, he buried it. (pg. 114)
• I wanted to cry but I didn't cry, I probably should have cried, I should have drowned us there in the room, ended our suffering, they would have found us floating face-down in two thousand white pages, buried under the salt of my evaporated tears. (pg. 124)
• 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. (pg. 130)
• I was the clay and she was the sculptor, 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. (pg. 133)
• She laughed, I love it when she laughs, although the truth is I am not in love with her. (pg. 135)
• 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? (pg. 145)
• "Is a love song a love song?" He said, "Yes!" I thought for a second. "Is love love?" He said, "No!" (pg. 156)
• "It's not a horrible world... but it's filled with a lot of horrible people!" (pg. 156)
• What if the water that came out of the shower was treated with a chemical that responded to a combination of things, like your heartbeat, and your body temperature, and your brain waves, so that your skin changed color according to your mood? If you were extremely excited your skin would turn green, and if you were angry you'd turn red, obviously, and if you felt like shiitake you'd turn brown, and if you were blue you'd turn blue.
  • Everyone could know what everyone else felt, and we could be more careful with each other, because you'd never want to tell a person whose skin was purple that you're angry at her for being late, just like you would want to pat a pink person on the back and tell him, "Congratulations!"
  • Another reason it would be a good invention is that there are so many times when you know you're feeling a lot of something, but you don't know what the something is. Am I frustrated? Am I actually just panicky? And that confusion changes your mood, it becomes your mood, and you become a confused, gray person. But with the special water, you could look at your orange hands and think, I'm happy! That whole time I was actually happy! What a relief! (pg. 163)
• You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness. (pg. 180)
• "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." (pg. 203)
• It broke my heart into more pieces than my heart was made of, why can't people say what they mean at the time? (pg. 279)
• I didn't want to hear about death. It was all anyone talked about, even when no one was actually talking about it. (pg. 295)
• "It was simple. Highs and lows make you feel that things matter, but they're nothing." "So what's something?" "Being reliable is something. Being good." (pg. 297)
• I tried to notice everything, because I wanted to be able to remember it perfectly. I've forgotten everything important in my life. I can't remember what the front door of the house I grew up in looked like. Or who stopped kissing first, me or my sister. Or the view from any window but my own. Some nights I lay awake for hours trying to remember my mother's face. (pg. 308)
• 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. (pg. 309)
• I kept thinking about how they were all the names of dead people, and how names are basically the only thing that dead people keep. (pg. 319)
• I don't believe in God, but I believe that things are extremely complicated. (pg. 324)