Quote

...he enclosed pieces of string that he used to measure out his body--his head, thigh, forearm, finger, neck, everything. He wanted me to sleep with them under my pillow. He said that when he came back, we would remeasure his body against the string as proof that he hadn't changed.

Jonathan Safran Foer

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Jonathan Safran Foer
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: February 21
Novelist
Writer
Washington
District of Columbia
Body
Proof
String
Back
Fingers
Pillow
Wanted
Pieces
Neck
Everything
Changed
Finger
Would
Head
Necks
Forearm
Sleep
Strings
Thigh
Came
Hadn
Enclosed
Used
Measure
Thighs

More quotes by Jonathan Safran Foer

Image
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.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
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 the opposite. Humor is a way of shrinking from that wonderful and terrible world.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
Every night before putting her to sleep, Yankel counts her ribs, as if one might have disappeared in the course of the day and become the seed and soil for some new companion to steal her away from him.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
I always write out of a need to read something, rather than a need to write something.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
He removed several pages of death certificates, which were picked up by another breeze and sent into the trees. Some would fall with the leaves that September. Some would fall with the trees generations later.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
Which, then, brings us closer to what we want to communicate: saying what we intend, or trying to say the opposite?
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
But I dig Negroes. I dig them all the way.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
...because he had been waiting for someone to come back to him, so every time someone knocked on the door, he couldn't stop himself from hoping it might be that person, even though he knew he shouldn't hope.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
It would be possible, in theory, for life and art to be reversed.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
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?
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
[…] but I believe that things are extremely complicated, and her looking over me was as complicated as anything could ever be. But it was also incredibly simple.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
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.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
Or maybe what he fears is just the opposite: that nobody is looking that his death, like his life, is without purpose that there is neither greater good nor evil--only people living and dying because their bodies function and then do not that the universe is a rip.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
The only thing worse than being sad is for others to know you are sad.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
Only someone who'd never been an animal would put up a sign saying not to feed them.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
What is suffering? I'm not sure what it is, but I know that suffering is the name we give to the origin of all the sighs, screams, and groans — small and large, crude and multifaceted — that concern us. The word defines our gaze even more than what we are looking at.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
She wrote, I wish I could be a girl again, with a chance to live my life again. I have suffered so much more than I needed to. And the joys I have felt have not always been joyous. I could have lived differently.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
Try to live so that you can always tell the truth.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
In my family, Father is the world champion at ending conversations.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
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.
Jonathan Safran Foer