All quotes by author Jonathan Safran Foer

"I felt suddenly shy. I was not used to shy. I was used to shame. Shyness is when you turn your head away from something you want. Shame is when you turn your head away from something you do not want."
--'Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close'

"You can see the most beautiful things from the observation deck of the Empire State Building. I read somewhere that people on the street are supposed to look like ants, but that's not true. They look like little people. And the cars look like little cars. And even the buildings look little. It's like New York is a miniature replica of New York, which is nice, because you can see what it's really like, instead of how it feels when you're in the middle of it."

"Everything is the way it is because everything was the way it was. Sometimes I feel ensnared in this, as if no matter what I do, what will come has already been fixed."
--'Everything is Illuminated'

"The more you love someone, he came to think, the harder it is to tell them. It surprised him that strangers didn't stop each other on the street to say I love you."
--'Everything is Illuminated'

"In the end, everyone loses everyone. There was no invention to get around that, and so I felt, that night, like the turtle that everything else in the universe was on top of."
-'Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close'

"'Even if I don't like what I am, I know what I am. My children like what they are, but they don't know what they are. So tell me which is worse.'"
--'Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close'

"I thought about all of the things that everyone ever says to each other, and how everyone is going to die, whether it's in a millisecond, or days, or months, or 76.5 years, if you were just born. 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."
--'Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close'

"Memory was supposed to fill the time, but it made time a hole to be filled. Each second was two hundred yards, to be walked, crawled. You couldn't see the next hour, it was so far in the distance. Tomorrow was over the horizon, and would take an entire day to reach."
--'Everything is Illuminated'

"I read the first chapter of A Brief History of Time when Dad was still alive, and I got incredibly heavy boots about how relatively insignificant life is, and how, compared to the universe and compared to time, it didn't even matter if I existed at all."
--'Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close'

"'It's so hard to express yourself.'
'I understand this.'
'I want to express myself.'
'The same is true for me.'
'I'm looking for my voice.'
'It's in your mouth.'
'I want to do something I'm not ashamed of.'
'Something you are proud of, yes?'
'Not even. I just don't want to be ashamed.'"
--'Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close'

"I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love."
--'Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close'

"We need enormous pockets, pockets big enough for our families and our friends, and even the people who aren't on our lists, people we've never met but still want to protect. We need pockets for boroughs and for cities, a pocket that could hold the universe."
--'Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close'

"Why are you leaving me? He wrote, I do not know how to live. I do not know either but I am trying. I do not know how to try. There were some things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him. So I buried them and let them hurt me."

"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."

"'I feel too much. That's what's going on.'
'Do you think one can feel too much? Or just feel in the wrong ways?'
'My insides don't match up with my outsides.'
'Do anyone's insides and outsides match up?'
'I don't know. I'm only me.'
'Maybe that's what a person's personality is:
the difference between the inside and outside.'
'But it's worse for me.'
'I wonder if everyone thinks it's worse for him.'
'Probably. But it really is worse for me.'"
--'Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close'

All your tomorrows start here.

All quotes by author Neil Gaiman

"Sometimes you wake up. Sometimes the fall kills you. And sometimes, when you fall, you fly."

"You get what anybody gets - you get a lifetime."

"Each person who ever was or is or will be has a song. It isn't a song that anybody else wrote. It has its own melody, it has its own words. Very few people get to sing their song. Most of us fear that we cannot do it justice with our voices, or that our words are too foolish or too honest, or too odd. So people live their song instead."

"There are so many fragile things, after all. People break so easily, and so do dreams and hearts."

"Stories are made up by people who make them up. If they work, they get retold. There's the magic of it."

"I hope you will have a wonderful year, that you'll dream dangerously and outrageously, that you'll make something that didn't exist before you made it, that you will be loved and that you will be liked, and that you will have people to love and to like in return. And, most importantly (because I think there should be more kindness and more wisdom in the world right now), that you will, when you need to be, be wise, and that you will always be kind."

"The view changes from where you are standing. Words can wound, and wounds can heal. All of these things are true."

"I think I fell in love with her, a little bit. Isn't that dumb? But it was like I knew her. Like she was my oldest, dearest friend. The kind of person you can tell anything to, no matter how bad, and they'll still love you, because they know you. I wanted to go with her. I wanted her to notice me. And then she stopped walking. Under the moon, she stopped. And looked at us. She looked at me. Maybe she was trying to tell me something; I don't know. She probably didn't even know I was there. But I'll always love her. All my life."

"The important thing about songs is that they're just like stories. They don't mean a damn unless there's people listenin' to them."

"If you want to imagine the future, imagine a boy and his dog and his friends. And a summer that never ends."

"You think you know all there is to know about her immediately upon meeting her, but everything you think you know is wrong. Passion flows through her like a river of blood. She only looked away for a moment, and the mask slipped, and you fell. All your tomorrows start here."

"You've a good heart. Sometimes that's enough to see you safe wherever you go. But mostly, it's not."

I want to walk like I'm the only woman on earth and I can have my pick.

If you want to see God laugh, make a plan.

"Being kissed on the back of the knee is a moth at the windowscreen."
--Anne Sexton

"The maid of honor - the unambiguous, grown-up equivalent of wearing best friend necklaces."
--Emily Giffin, 'Love The One You're With'

"Whatever you get paid attention for is never what you think is most important about yourself."
--David Foster Wallace

"What do women want? I want a red dress. I want it flimsy and cheap. I want it too tight. I want to wear it until someone tears it off me. I want it sleeveless and backless, this dress, so no one has to guess what's underneath. I want to walk down the street past Thrifty's and the hardware store with all those keys glittering in the window, past Mr. and Mrs. Wong selling day-old donuts in their café, past the Guerra brothers slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly, hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders. I want to walk like I'm the only woman on earth and I can have my pick. I want that red dress bad. I want it to confirm your worst fears about me, to show you how little I care about you or anything except what I want. When I find it, I'll pull that garment from its hanger like I'm choosing a body to carry me into this world, through the birth-cries and the love-cries too, and I'll wear it like bones, like skin, it'll be the goddamned dress they bury me in."
--Kim Addonizio

Mouthing knowledge as your heart falls out of your mouth.

"He who does not understand your silence will probably not understand your words."
--Elbert Hubbard

"Watch out for intellect, because it knows so much it knows nothing and leaves you hanging upside down, mouthing knowledge as your heart falls out of your mouth."
--Anne Sexton

You live and you learn.

"And now we're supposed to go back to our normal lives. That's what people do. They have these amazing experiences with another person and then they just go home and clean the bathroom or whatever."
--Susane Colasanti, 'When It Happens'

"Out there people are working and arguing and laughing, living their beautiful, terrible lives, falling in love and having babies and being bored out of their skulls and feeling depressed, then being consoled by some little thing like watching the patterns the light makes through the leaves of trees, casting shadows on the sidewalks. I remember the line from that poem now. Downward to darkness, on extended wings."
--Kim Addonizio

"You live and you learn. At any rate, you live."
--Douglas Adams

You can't love anything more than something you miss.

"My great hope is to laugh as much as I cry, to get my work done, and try to love somebody and have the courage to accept the love in return."
--Maya Angelou

"There isn't anyone you couldn't love once you've heard their story."
--Mary Lou Kownacki, Mr. Rogers' favorite quote

"She wants to know if I love her, that's all anyone wants from anyone else, not love itself but the knowledge that love is there, like new batteries in the flashlight in the emergency kit in the hall closet."
--Jonathan Safran Foer

"It's the tragedy of loving, you can't love anything more than something you miss."
--Jonathan Safran Foer

"Love? Be it man. Be it woman. It must be a wave you want to glide in on, give your body to it, give your laugh to it, give, when the gravelly sand takes you, your tears to the land. To love another is something like prayer and can't be planned, you just fall into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief."
--Anne Sexton

She would never be happy and honest at the same time.

"Does it break my heart, of course, every moment of every day, into more pieces than my heart was made of, I never thought of myself as quiet, much less silent, I never thought about things at all, everything changed, the distance that wedged itself between me and my happiness wasn't the world, it wasn't the bombs and burning buildings, it was me, my thinking, the cancer of never letting go, is ignorance bliss, I don't know, but it's so painful to think, and tell me, what did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever bring me? I think and think and think, I've thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it."
--Jonathan Safran Foer

Her life was a slow realization that the world was not for her, and that for whatever reason, she would never be happy and honest at the same time.

"With freedom, flowers, books, and the moon, who could not be perfectly happy?"
--Oscar Wilde