December 2010
“‘I want to do something I’m not ashamed of.’ ‘Something you are proud of, yes?’ ‘Not even. I just don’t want to be ashamed.’”
—Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
“He would wake from sleep to miss the weight that never depressed the bed next to him, remember in earnest the weight of gestures she never made, long for the un-weight of her un-arm slung over his too real chest, making his widower’s remembrances that much more convincing and his pain that much more real. He felt that he had lost her. He had lost her. At night he would reread the letters that she had never written him.”
—Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
“The only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad.”
—Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
“Why couldn’t she have slid it under the door? he wondered. Why couldn’t she have folded it? It looked just like any other note she would leave him, like, Could you try to fix the broken knocker? or I’ll be back soon, don’t worry. It was so strange to him that such a different kind of note—I had to do it for myself—could look exactly the same: trivial, mundane, nothing. He could have hated her for leaving it there in plain sight, and he could have hated her for the plainness of it, a message without adornment, without any small clue to indicate that yes, this is important, yes, this is the most painful note I’ve ever written, yes, I would sooner die than have to write this again. Where were the dried teardrops? Where was the tremor in the script?”
—Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
“‘Your train ride appeased you?’ I asked. ‘Oh, God,’ he said, ‘twenty-six hours, fucking unbelievable.’ This girl Unbelievable must be very majestic, I thought.”
—Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
“
There were those who suspected that he was not pinned under his wagon but swept out to sea, with the secrets of his life kept forever inside him, like a love note in a bottle, to be found one morning by an unsuspecting couple on a romantic beach. It’s possible that he, or some part of him, washed up on the sands of the Black Sea, or in Rio, or that he made it all the way to Ellis Island.
Or perhaps a widow found him and took him in: bought him an easy chair, changed his sweater every morning, shaved his face until the hair stopped growing, took him faithfully to bed with her every night, whispered sweet nothings into what was left of his ear, laughed with him over black coffee, cried with him over yellowing pictures, talked greenly about having kids of her own, began to miss him before she became sick, left him everything in her will, thought of only him as she died, always knew he was a fiction but believed in him anyway.
” —Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
Listen
Kiss With a Fist, Florence + The Machine
