Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close -Jonathan Safran Foer

It was heartbreaking, but beautiful.

This is what I'll remember:

-"Why do beautiful songs make you sad?" "Because they aren't true." "Never?" "Nothing is beautiful and true."

-"I feel too much. That's what's going on." "Do you think one can feel too much? Or just feel the wrong ways? "My insides don't match up with my outsides." "Do anyone's inside 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 the 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."

-"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"

-"It's easy to be emotional. You can always make a scene... Highs and lows make you feel that things matter, but they're nothing." "So what's something?" "Being reliable is something. Being good."

-"I wanted to give him an infinitely long blank book and the rest of time."

-"It broke my heart into more pieces than my heart was made of, why can't people say what they mean at the time? "

-"It's the tragedy of loving, you can't love anything more than something you miss." ..."I'm so afraid of losing something I love, that I refuse to love anything."

-"He had a wall of masks from every country he‘d been to, like Armenia and Chile and Ethiopia. It‘s not a horrible world, he told me, but it‘s filled with a lot of horrible people."

-"I spent my life learning to feel less. Every day I felt less." "Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?" "You can not protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness."