“Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living”

“I like to see people reunited, 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.”

“Do you think I’m wonderful? she asked him one day as they leaned against the trunk of a petrified maple. No, he said. Why? Because so many girls are wonderful. I imagine hundreds of men have called their loves wonderful today, and it’s only noon. You couldn’t be something that hundreds of others are.”

“Why do beautiful songs make you sad?’ ‘Because they aren’t true.’ ‘Never?’ ‘Nothing is beautiful and true.”

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

“This is love, she thought, isn’t it? When you notice someone’s absence and hate that absence more than anything? More, even, than you love his presence?”

“I am doing something I hate for you. This is what it means to be in love.”

“we burned with love for ourselves, all of us, starters of the fire we suffered- our love was the affliction for which only our love was the cure”

— Jonathan Safran Foer