Everything is Illuminated

(by Jonathan Safran Foer)


“I am a very premium person to be with. I am homely, and also severely funny and these are winning things.”



“’Today you believe in God?’ And he would say ‘today I believe in love.’”



“We are all too good for each other.”



“He died from being an artist.”



“It would be possible, in theory, for life and art to be reversed.”


"We must go backward in order to go forward.”


“our love was the affliction for which only our love was the cure…”


“He couldn’t bear to live, but he couldn’t bear to die.”


“He awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounded and as impossible as it actually was, happy.”



“the only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad.”



“something, everything, is missing...what is here is only what is not here.”



“humorous is the only truthful way to tell a sad story.”



“the bruises go away, and so does how you hate, and so does the feeling that everything you receive in life is something you have earned.”


“I want to do something I’m not ashamed of.”



“Of course it bothers me when you’re a fool.”



“She wrapped her arms around his neck, as if trying to pull herself into him, or him into her.”



“she would never be happy and honest at the same time.”



“She addressed her world honestly, searching for something deserving of the volumes of love she knew she had within her.”



“Love itself became the object of her love.”



“If there is no love in the world, we will make a new world.”


“Love me, because love doesn’t exist, and I have tried everything that does.”



“She was wise and thoughtful enough to lie.”


“…willfully creating and believing fictions necessary for life.”



“…’Deep down, the young are lonelier than the old.’ I read that in a book somewhere and it’s stuck in my head. Maybe it’s true. Maybe it’s not true. More likely, the young and the old are lonely in different ways, in their own ways…”



“It occurred to me this afternoon that there is nothing in the world I like so much as writing in my diary. It never misunderstand me and I never misunderstand it. We are like perfect lovers, like one person.”



“She repeats things until they are true, or until she can’t tell whether they are true or not.”



“Is she crying?... Or was the artist just trying to make her look more beautiful?”



“She had a good heart (which was worth more than a good brain)”



“Love... is the immovability of truth.”



“Why are the painful things always electromagnets?”



“She says mochaccinos are special today, because they are coffee.”



“I was deceiving him, and I am certain that he desired to be deceived.”


“There are only so many times that you can utter ‘It does not hurt’ before it begins to hurt even more than the hurt.”



“This is love… when you notice someone’s absence and hate that absence more than anything.”



“The only way to overcome sadness is to consume it.”


“Death is the only thing in life that you absolutely have to be aware of as it’s happening.”


“They had never known the deepest intimacy, that closeness attainable only with distance.”


“the hole is no void; the void exists around it.”


“Those who prayed came to believe less and less in the god of their creation and more and more in their belief.”


“I can be a melancholy person in manners that are interesting, not only melancholy.”



“With writing we have second chances.”



“Everything is the way it is because everything was the way it was.”



“I beseech you to forgive us, and to make us better than we are. Make us good.”



“You should never have to be the one remaining.”


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


“I used to think that humor was the only way to appreciate how wonderful and terrible the world is, to celebrate how big life is… But now I think it’s the opposite. Humor is a way of shrinking from that wonderful and terrible world.”



“We were both secretly in love with words, I guess.”


“Your wedding day is not time to be comfortable.”


“Doing right often means feeling wrong, and if you find yourself feeling wrong, you’re probably doing right.”



“It is, by love’s definition, impossible to love two people.”


“It does not matter if you are guileless, or delicate, or modest. Just be yourself.”



“We love the things that we commiserate.”


“I do not think that there are any limits to how excellent we could make life seem.”


“But if you do persevere, do not doe so for curiosity. That is not a good enough reason.”


“Sometimes if is better to say something queer than not to say anything.”


“’It is said that the Messiah will come at the end of the world.’ ‘But is was not the end of the world,’... ‘It was. He just did not come.’ ‘Why did he not come?’ ‘This was the lesson we learned from everything that happened – there is no God. It took all of the hidden faces for Him to prove this to us.’ ‘What if it was a challenge of your faith?’… ‘I could not believe in a God what would challenge faith like this.’ ‘What if it was not in His power?’ “I could not believe in a God that could not stop what happened.’ ‘What if it was man and not God that did all of this?’ ‘I do not believe in man, either.’”



“She does not desire happiness… the only way she can live is if she is melancholy.”


“Books are for those without real lives… and they are no real replacement.”


“It was not the Jew, of course, who invented the love poem, but the other way around.”


“The problem of evil: why unconditionally bad things happen to unconditionally good people. They never do.”


“The novel is that art form that burns most easily.”



“Art: … I want to sell this, or I want this to make me famous and loved or, I want this to make me whole, or worse, I want this to make others whole.”



“Music is beautiful.”



“(Words never mean what we want them to mean.) If we communicated with something like music, we would never be misunderstood, because there is nothing in music to understand.”


“Unable to thwart the fury of a poet scorned.”



“God loves the plagiarist. And so it is written, ‘God created humankind in His image, in the image of God He created them.’ God is the original plagiarizer. With a lack of reasonable sources from which to filch – man created in the image of what? The animals?—the creation of man was an act of reflexive plagiarizing; God looted the mirror. When we plagiarize, we are likewise creating in the image and participating in the completion of Creation.”


“Were we praying, Forgive our oppressor for what they have done? Or, Forgive us for what has been done to us? Or, Forgive You for Your inscrutability?”


“The end of the world has come often, and continues to often come. Unforgiving, unrelenting, bringing darkness upon darkness, the end of the world is something we have become well acquainted with, habitualized, made into a ritual. It is our religion to try to forget it in its absence, make peace with it when it is undeniable, and return its embrace when it finally comes for us, as it always does.”



“There has yet to be a human to survive a span of history without at least one end of the world.”

“and if we are to strive for a better future, mustn’t we be familiar and reconciled with our past?”


“...sadness of a God who would need people to pray to Him…”



“...sadness of love without release”



“...sadness of not knowing enough words to express what you mean.”


“I know that it is not necessary that there be one right thing. There may be two right things. There may be no right things.”


“I present not-truths in order to protect you… Everything is to protect you. I exist in case you need to be protected.”


“the origin of a story is always an absence.”



“the easiest things for you to give are the hardest things for you to give.”


“She told him that she had contemplated suicide, as if it were a decision.”



“The more you love someone, he came to think, the harder it is to tell them. It surprised him that strangers didn’t stop each other on the street to say I love you.”


“To feel alone is to be alone.”


“I would never command you to write a story that is as it occurred in the actual, but I would command you to make your story faithful.”



“you are all in the proximity of love, and all disavow love.”


“What good is all this love doing on paper?”



“There is no love. Only the end of love.”


“These are my ghosts, the spaces amid love.”


“I wanted so much for him to live a good life, without death and without choices and without shame.”


“We believed in things, we were so foolish.”



“Nobody likes war not even those who survive it, not even the winners.”



“We stood next to each other because that is what friends do in the presence of evil or love.”


“I loved him so much that I madeloveimpossible.”


“The only thing more painful than being an active forgetting is to be an inert rememberer.”



“His love had overtaken him from the inside out, like a sickness.”


“It was impossible to remember what one meant, what, after all of the words, was intended.”


“They waited to die, and we cannot blame them, because we would do the same, and we do do the same.”


“She did all of those things and so many more, things I would never tell anyone, and she never even love me. Now that’s love.”


“We fought so much just to remind ourselves that we were in love.”


“Her grief is replaced with a useful sadness.”



“Every love is carved from loss.”


“Peace. That is all that I would ever want for them. Not money and not even love.”