Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

Heart, we will forget him! You and I, to-night! You may forget the warmth he gave, I will forget the light. When you have done, pray tell me, That I my thoughts may dim; Haste! lest while you’re lagging, I may remember him!

The punctuation of anniversaries is terrible, like the closing of doors, one after another between you and what you want to hold on to.

I only felt a cold wind blow while I tried to hang on to the past.

The brooding is better than the joy because even if the heart fills with happiness, it still mourns.

The past is one evil less and one memory more.

When you put so much effort to forget someone, the effort itself becomes a memory. Then you have to forget the forgetting, and that too is memorable.

I drug your ghost across the country, and we plotted out my death. Every city and memory we whispered "Here is where you rest." Well I was determined in Chicago but I dug my teeth into my knees And I settled for a telephone, sang into your machine: "You are my sunshine, my only sunshine.

You can't kill it with goodbye; It always finds a place to hide inside your heart for your whole life. Love is never-ending.

Heart-aches are forgotten, tears lose their bitterness, and like a leaf of lavendar in a store of linen, so does Memory make life sweet.

These are the intensities that one cannot live with, that he has to outgrow if he wants to survive. But who can help grieving for them? If the blood vessels could hold them, how much better to keep those early loves with us?

There's no use in weeping, Though we are condemned to part: There's such a thing as keeping, A remembrance in one's heart.

You'll remember someone who broke your heart, and you'll think to yourself, 'Oh yes, I remember how that feels.' But you can't.

For years I have been mourning and not for my dead, it is for this boy for whatever corner in my heart died when his childhood slid out of my arms.

Ah, tell me not that memory sheds gladness o'er the past, what is recalled by faded flowers, save that they did not last?

Something that required the best of you has ended. You will miss it.

The end of anything is not fun because there's a nostalgia to it and everything else. Even the end of a bad relationship can feel so, so, so sad.

Some things you just don't get over.

The bottom line is I'm writing to save the dead. I'm writing to save the people I have lost, some of whose bodies are still walking around.

The bat is gone, but the smile remains.

Of joys departed, not to return, how painful the remembrance.

The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

I remember this song by Clay Walker that came out in the '90s called 'This Woman and This Man,' and it was about breaking up, loss, the pain of moving on, and my parents were just getting divorced at the time, so I listened to it over and over again.

I was right when I said I'd never look back. It hurts too much, it drags at your heart till you can't ever do anything else except look back.

For the first time I was learning how much easier it was to leave than to stay behind and love.