Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

I'm not surprised that I tend to go for the dark side. I was a really scared kid, so I think I understand what scares people.

There are people in your past that you can't shake free from no matter how hard you tried. There's a certain process that you have to go through to say goodbye. That fire doesn't get extinguished. You have to put a gun to it.

A lot of the time, I write in the third person, but I'm mostly describing my own ordeals. When those unsettled struggles prey on your mind, you become haunted. To get free, you must defeat your ghosts.

I think...she said finally, "that all of us have got our ghosts.

You must never allow something that happened to you to become a morbidly treasured heirloom that you carry, show people, put back in its black velvet pouch and then tuck back into your jacket where you can keep it close to your heart.

There are ghosts everywhere," Ser Jorah said softly. "We carry them with us wherever we go.

I'd rather have a broken arm than a broken heart.

Everybody's got a 'thing.' Some 'things' are nice and quiet. Some 'things' have fangs and claws. Some 'things' stink and have slobber everywhere.

Love and pain become one in the same in the eyes of a wounded child.

Everyone carries around his own monsters.

Disaster is private, in its way, as love is.

Childhood should be carefree, playing in the sun; not living a nightmare in the darkness of the soul.

What's often in your heart is the hardest to reach.

But the hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes.

I lost a child," she said, meeting Lusa's eyes directly. "I thought I wouldn't live through it. But you do. You learn to love the place somebody leaves behind for you.

Because i've suffered. Because many times in my life i have tried to love with all my heart, and my love has wound up being trampled or betrayed.

It was stressful [to live as a child in a Sylvian Hills]. It's always been complicated, honestly... I do not really want to tell you, actually. It bothers me that you want me to tell this.

We become imprisoned by our memories, and that makes our lives wretched.

I'm afraid of the skeletons in my closet. I've got a whole cemetery full of them.

If it works out, it's the best thing in the world. If it doesn't work out, it's like having your heart torn out and chopped up into little pieces while you watch. It leaves a big hollow space that never really heals.

No one and nothing can harm us, child, except what we fear and love.

They claim a hidden corner of our hearts, all those moments that stay with us unscreamed. That's where loves, like elephants, drag themselves to die. It's the place where pride allows itself to cry.

n the dark everyone felt the same: the edges blurred. When I think of myself then, what I was like two years ago, I feel like a wound in a bad place, prone to be bumped on corners or edges. Never able to heal.

Love had always issued out of the places that hurt the most.

Now I know that grief is a whetstone that sharpens all your love, all your happiest memories, into blades that tear you apart from within.