Fuck Yeah, Jonathan Safran Foer!

"The images of his infinite pasts and infinite futures washed over him as he waited, paralyzed, in the present."

- Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated (via colourmegreenwich)

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

- Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything is Illuminated) (via falaz)

"She was a genius of sadness, immersing herself in it, separating its numerous strands, appreciating its subtle nuances. She was a prism through which sadness could be divided into its infinite spectrum."

- Jonathan Safran Foer, “Everything Is Illuminated” (via wesssels)

"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."

- Everything is Illuminated - Jonathan Safran Foer (via laruebleu)

"She told him of ship voyages she had taken to places he had never heard of, and stories he knew were all untrue, were bad nottruths, even, but he nodded and tried to convince himself to be convinced, tried to believe her, because he knew that the origin of a story is always an absence, and he wanted her to live among presences."

- Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated (via sheisyourcocaine)

"The novel is that art form that burns most easily. It so happened that in the middle of the nineteenth century, all the citizens of our shtetl —every man, woman, and child—was convinced he had at least one novel in him. This period was likely the result of the traveling Gypsy salesman who brought a wagonload of books to the shtetl square on the third Sunday of every other month, advertising them as Worthy would-be worlds of words, whorls of working wonder. What else could come to the lips of a Chosen People but I can do that? More than seven hundred novels were written between 1850 and 1853. One began: How long it’s been since I last thought of those windswept mornings. Another: They say everyone remembers her first time, but I don’t. Another: Murder is an ugly deed, to be sure, but the murder of a brother is truly the most ghastly crime known to man. There were 272 thinly veiled memoirs, 66 crime novels, 97 stories of war. A man killed his brother in 107 of the novels. In all but 89 an infidelity was committed. Couples in love wondered what the future would hold in 29; 68 ended with a kiss; all but 35 used the word “shame.” Those who couldn’t read and write made visual novels: collages, etchings, pencil drawings, watercolors. A special room was added to the Yankel and Brod Library for the Trachimbrod novels, although only a handful were read five years after their composition. Once, almost a century later, a young boy went browsing the aisles. I’m looking for a book, he told the librarian, who had cared for the Trachimbrod novels since she was a girl, and was the only citizen to have read them all. My great-grandfather wrote it. What was his name? the librarian asked. Safranbrod, but I think he wrote it under a pseudonym. What was the name of his book? I can’t remember the name. He used to talk about it all the time. He’d tell me stories from it to put me to sleep. What’s it about? she asked. It’s about love. She laughed. They’re all about love."

- Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated (via sheisyourcocaine)

"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)