Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

I'd love to retouch my whole life.

There is no greater sorrow than to recall happiness in times of misery.

There is no greater sorrow Than to be mindful of the happy time In misery

Will that light come again, As now these tears come...falling hot and real!

Even the mistakes and the pain that you've caused and enacted upon you. That is definitely what I'm trying to capture

Take back the smile and the night, take it all back, I wish I could.

Our suffering is caused by holding on to how things might have been, should have been, could have been.

No, I don’t live in heartache. I don’t cry myself to sleep or any of that. I am, I tell myself, over it. But I do feel a void, icky as that sounds. And—like it or not—I still think about her every single day.

No sadness is greater than in misery to rehearse memories of joy.

I wish I were dead, or that it were tomorrow night,' groaned Phil.

The origin of sorrow is this: to wish for something that does not come to pass.

Sir, sorrow is inherent in humanity. As you cannot judge two and two to be either five, or three, but certainly four, so, when comparing a worse present state with a better which is past, you cannot but feel sorrow. It is not cured by reason, but by the incursion of present objects, which bear out the past.

I'm not sure whether I've been happy. After my last book tour, I sat on my balcony with a cup of tea. I thought: 'You can't rewind the movie. I've spent more than half my life in the Middle East. There have been great moments of horror and depression and loneliness.'

My dad had a lot of bad luck. You could see his suffering, his terrible suffering, living a life that was disappointing and looking for another one.

I no longer want reminders of what was, what got broken, what got lost, what got wasted.

There is no worse sorrow than remembering happiness in the day of sorrow.

I think it's natural as you get to the end of your twenties to start thinking about what you could have done differently - whether they went well or whether they went terribly.

We are never happy; we can only remember that we were so once.

The pain of parting is nothing to the joy of meeting again.

Well, I would have much preferred to have had a normal childhood. I would have loved it if my greatest dilemma, at 14, was whether to go to Benetton for my pullovers. I would have preferred not to have cried all the tears I have cried.

Nostalgia is something we think of as fuzzy. But it's pain. Pain concerning the past.

I think there's always a bit of pain in everything that's ecstatic - relationships and love, they always come with pain.

How little remains of the man I once was, save the memory of him! But remembering is only a new form of suffering.

There is something in the pang of change More than the heart can bear, Unhappiness remembering happiness.

I had looked forward so eagerly to leaving the horrible place, yet when my release came and I knew that God's sunlight was to be free for me again, there was a certain pain in leaving.