"When she woke up crying from one of her nightmares, the Kolker would stay with her, brush her hair with his hands, collect her tears in thimbles for her to drink the next morning (The only way to overcome sadness is to consume it, he said), and more than that: once her eyes closed and
she fell back asleep, he was left to bear the insomnia. There was a complete transfer, like a speeding billiard ball colliding with a resting one. Should Brod feel depressed—she was always depressed—the Kolker would sit with her until he could convince her that it’s OK. It is. Really. And when she would move on with her day, he would stay behind, paralyzed with a grief he couldn’t name and that wasn’t his. Should Brod become sick, it was the Kolker who would be bedridden by week’s end. Should Brod feel bored, knowing too many languages, too many facts, with too much knowledge to be happy, the Kolker would stay up all night studying her books, studying the pictures, so the next day he could try to make the kind of small talk that would please his young wife."
- Jonathan Safran Foer - Everything is Illuminated (via sheisyourcocaine)
May 1
"Food, for her, is not food. It is terror, dignity, gratitude, vengeance, joyfulness, humiliation, religion, history, and, of course, love. As if the fruits she always offered us were picked from the destroyed branches of our family tree."
"Things were as they were before, but they will be different now. Things will be better. We will be better.
Sounds & feels great, but better how? I could think of endless ways to make myself better (I could learn foreign languages, be more patient, work harder), but I’d already made too many such vows to trust them anymore. I could also think of all the endless ways to make “us” better, but the meaningful things we can agree on & change in a relationship are few. In actuality, even in those moments when so much feels possible, very little is."
- J. Safran Foer (Eating Animals). (via karndazzle)
Apr 30
"In bed that night I invented a special drain that would be underneath every pillow in New York, and would connect to the reservoir. Whenever people cried themselves to sleep, the tears would all go to the same place, and in the morning the weatherman would report if the water level in the Reservoir of Tears had gone up or down, and you could know if New York was in heavy boots."
"So she had to satisfy herself with the idea of love - loving the loving of things whose existence she didn’t care at all about. Love itself became the object of her love. She loved herself in love, she loved loving love, as love loves loving, and was able, in that way, to reconcile herself with a world that fell so short of what she would have hoped for. It was not the world that was the great and saving lie, but her willingness to make it beautiful and fair, to live a once-removed life, in a world once-removed from the one in which everyone else seemed to exist."
- Everything is Illuminated, by Jonathan Safran Foer. (via zeddified)
"I started inventing things, and then I couldn’t stop, like beavers, which I know about. People think they cut down trees so they can build dams, but in reality it’s because their teeth never stop growing, and if they didn’t constantly file them down by cutting through all of those trees, their teeth would start to grow into their own faces, which would kill them. That’s how my brain was."
libertyburstingmind:
…whenever I come across two fantastic authors that are married to each other. (Isn’t it nice that you enjoy doing the same awesome things? like writing novels?)
Just like Nicole Krauss (The History of Love) & Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close).
I can only imagine the beautiful stories they tell their son before bed.
“I think music is probably the most directly impactful art form. I mean, it’s the one that, within three minutes, you can find yourself screaming at the top of your lungs and banging your fists. And a novel never does that.”
"I told him, “I read something in National Geographic about how, when an animal thinks it’s going to die, it gets panicky and starts to act crazy. But when it knows it’s going to die, it gets very, very calm.” “Maybe he didn’t want you to worry.” Maybe. Maybe he didn’t say he loved me because he loved me. But that wasn’t a good enough explanation. I said, “I need to know how he died.”
He flipped back and pointed at, “Why?”
“So I can stop inventing how he died. I’m always inventing.”
He flipped back and pointed at, “I’m sorry.”"
- Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer (via andthenfuck)
