Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

We all have sadness in our life and things that we can draw upon.

I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.

Character and emotionality don't always have to be relegated to quieter, more simple constructs.

Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.

Anyone who has to write an obituary for me one day will probably say, 'She did absolute depths of agony really well.' I'm not, however, an unhappy person.

There's a strong melancholic streak in me.

There was a sadness over me, a melancholy. That's always been a part of me - those are some of the things that lead you to the arts.

I like the idea of a record being more than one thing emotionally - human beings go through so many emotions in one day - and I like those things sitting next to each other.

I am not a calm, happy person. I am complicated.

Jealousy. Depression. Love. They pretty much demonstrate the whole range of human emotion.

Like them you are tall and taciturn, and you are sad, all at once, like a voyage.

Somehow, like so many people who get depressed, we felt our depressions were more complicated and existentially based than they actually were.

I never feel the need to go out and make some grand statement that I'm dark and twisty and complicated, because I'm not that either. It's just not as simple as ponies and rainbows, though I do love ponies and rainbows.

Being in the depths of sadness is just as important an experience as being exuberantly happy.

I've always been attracted to sad. If you look at Woody Allen movies, he's often playing a sad clown, and it's always been interesting. And angry clown is even more interesting.

Life consists of sadness too. And sadness is also beautiful; it has its own depth, its own delicacy, its own deliciousness, its own taste. A man is poorer if he has not known sadness; he is impoverished, very much impoverished. His laughter will be shallow, his laughter will not have depth, because depth comes only through sadness. A man who knows sadness, if he laughs, his laughter will have depth. His laughter will have something of his sadness too, his laughter will be more colorful.

One does not always know how to express the sorrow of the soul. One does not always know how to silence the joy of the heart.

The very gnarliest and hardest of hearts has some musical strings in it; but they are tuned differently in every one of us.

No matter what terror the earth could produce - winds, seas - a person could produce the same, lived with the same, lived with all that mixed-up nature swirling inside, every bit. There was nothing as complex in the world - no flower or stone - as a single hello from a human being.

I would not exchange the sorrows of my heart for the joys of the multitude. And I would not have the tears that sadness makes to flow from my every part turn into laughter. I would that my life remain a tear and a smile.

I know,' said Erin, and described how she'd lately felt depressed in a new and scary way, which Paul also had felt lately and described as a sadness-based fear, immune to tone and interpretation, as if not meant for humans - more visceral than sadness, but unlike fear because it decreased heart rate and impaired the senses, causing everything to seem 'darker.

I'm kind of sad and happy all the time. Just kind of like feeling, you know, full of life and confident, and at the same time terrified. I'm all of those things at once.

Melancholy is the pleasure of being sad.

Each substance of a grief has twenty shadows.