Jonathan Safran Foer

Once you hear something, you can never return to the time before you heard it.

She avoids mirrors, and lifts a powerful telescope to find herself.

It was one of the best days of my life, a day during which I lived my life and didn't think about my life at all.

"My insides don't match up with my outsides." "Do anyone's inside and outsides match up?" "I don't know. I'm only me." "Maybe that's what a person's personality is: the difference between the inside and the outside."

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?

And yet and yet - the last secret of the tree of codes is that nothing can ever reach a definite conclusion. Nowhere as much as there do we feel possibilities shaken by the nearness of realization. The atmosphere becomes possibilities and we shall wander and make a thousand mistakes. We shall wander along yet not be able to understand.

In the morning, when the nothing vase casts a something shadow, like the memory of someone you've lost, what can you say about that?

We believed in our grandmother’s cooking more fervently than we believed in God.

The philosopher Elaine Scarry has observed that "beauty always takes place in the particular." Cruelty, on the other hand, prefers abstraction.

Am I such a bad person for dreaming of a world that ends when I do? I don't mean the world ending with respect to me, but every set of eyes closing with mine.

It’s hard to say goodbye to the place you’ve lived. It can be as hard as saying goodbye to a person.

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.

...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.

Life was a small negative space cut out of the eternal solidity, and for the first time, it felt precious - not like all of the words that had come to mean nothing, but like the last breath of a drowning victim.

Everything that's born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they're all on fire, and we're all trapped.

My boots were so heavy that I was glad there was a column beneath us. How could such a lonely person have been living so close to me my whole life? If I had known, I would have gone up to keep him company.

One of the greatest opportunities to live our values-or betray them-lies in the food we put on our plates.

I realized that your mother couldn't see the emptiness, she couldn't see anything...All of the words I'd written to her over all of those years, had I never said anything to hear at all?

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.

It was not the feeling of completeness I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty.

Memories are small prayers to God, if we believed in that sort of thing.