Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

Have you ever had so much to say that your mouth closed up tight struggling to harness the nuclear force coalescing within your words? Have you ever had so many thoughts churning inside you that you didn’t dare let them escape in case they blew you wide open? Have you ever been so angry that you couldn’t look in the mirror for fear of finding the face of evil glaring back at you?

I had always held everything in before.

Sure you have feelings and you get emotional and angry but I kept everything inside because I think I still had that thought in my mind - I didn't want to get suspended again

There's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but I'm too tough for him, I say, stay in there, I'm not going to let anybody see you.

Somewhere, far down, there was an itch in his heart, but he made it a point not to scratch it. He was afraid of what might come leaking out.

Iain didn't go back to sleep for a long while. He continued to think about all the logical reasons he would never allow himself to be turned into a lovesick weakling like Patrick, and when he finally fell asleep, he had convinced himself that he would distance his heart from his mind. He dreamed about her.

If I let a little of the emotion out, all of it will come out, and it will never end.

For years I have endeavored to calm an impetuous tide -- laboring to make my feelings take an orderly course -- it was striving against the stream.

He does not like showing his feelings and would rather do a cruel thing than open his heart freely.

She had willed her heart to stay small and contained, but it wouldn’t be. Oh, well.

Staying silent, staying away from him... that was the hardest thing I've ever done.

I'm all over the place, up and down, scattered, withdrawing, trying to find some elusive sense of serenity." The world can't give that serenity. The world can't give us peace. We can only find it in our hearts." I hate that." I know. But the good news is that by the same token, the world can't take it away.

Concealed sorrow bursts the heart, and rages within us as an internal fire.

Even if your heart is broken and attacking you, you're still not better off without it.

Sometimes I knew in all my mind and heart why I had done what I had done, and I welcomed the sacrifice. But there were times too when I lived in a desert and felt no joy and saw no hope and could not remember my old feelings. Then I lived by faith alone, faith without hope. What good did I get from it? I got to have love in my heart.

The mind scolds the heart, which makes excuses and goes its own way.

The battle over flesh and blood cannot compare to the battle for the heart.

I can hear my brother's voice in my head. Your problem is that you're too emotional. But how can I not be emotional, Rowan? How can I not care?

the storm thunders at my heart; I find it difficult to believe in the existence of anything except the clouds which limit my horizon.

I understand that in the industry, a lot of it isn't real. Which is a difficult thing. Where I come from a lot of people are straightforward and I've had to learn how to not say exactly what I feel. Sometimes it gets frustrating being a person who says what he feels and what his heart is telling him. Every once in a while I fall into letting the industry get the best of me and not just saying exactly what I feel.

When we speak, we want to say something sweet, but we don't say something sweet because something is ordering us from deep down to say something unkind. We want to open our hearts to people, but we can't do it, because we are being ordered around by the sufferings we have concealed deep in our consciousness.

I'm a girl who has been tamping down her emotions and keeping them tightly guarded her whole life. And that works really well for me. [...] And now I felt like my shell had a dangerous crack in it. Without much more effort on his part, it would split wide open and my enormous river of emotions would gush out - the bad and the good. It was pretty much the scariest thing I'd ever thought of.

It is kind of hard to hold a lot in. But for me… it’s sometimes even harder to let it out.

The domination of one's spirit and mind is not a pretty thing, but I think it happens.