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She extended a hand that I didn't know how to take, so I broke its fingers with my silence.

Jonathan Safran Foer

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Jonathan Safran Foer
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: February 21
Novelist
Writer
Washington
District of Columbia
Hand
Didn
Hands
Take
Extended
Broke
Fingers
Silence

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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?
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I started carrying blank books like this one around, which I would fill with all the things I couldn't say.
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I wanted to touch him, to tell him that even if everyone left everyone, I would never leave him, he talked and talked, his words fell through him, trying to find the floor to his sadness.
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I watched the sheets breathe when she breathed, like how Dad used to say that trees inhale when people exhale, because I was too young to understand the truth about biological processes.
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I can't even say 'hair pie,'' I told him, 'unless I'm talking about an actual pie made out of rabbits.
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But come. No explaining or mending. Be beside me somewhere.
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Only now do I understand the war against boredom, the lost cause of empty hours, of empty days and nights.
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I zipped myself all the way into the sleeping bag of myself, not because I was hurt, and not because I had broken something, but because they were cracking up.
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The only thing worse than being sad is for others to know you are sad.
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