Book 10: Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

 Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

This book took me a long time to read; I had to be in a certain mindset to read it.  I like the typeset and how Foer plays with page design and layout, but I had some issues with Oskar. I found the ending of the story made every minor issue I had with the rest of the book pointless. The ending is simply amazing.

A must read.

4.5 out of 5

2 months ago · 3 notes

…she wants to know if I love her, that’s all anyone wants from anyone else, not love itself but the knowledge that love is there, like new batteries in the flashlight in the emergency kind in the hall closet…
—  Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

2 months ago · 3 notes

I’m sorry for my inability to let the unimportant things go, for my inability to hold on to the important things.
—  Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

2 months ago · 13 notes

Being with him made my brain quiet. I didn’t have to invent a thing.
—  Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer

4 months ago · 14 notes

If I’d been someone else in a different world I’d’ve done something different, but I was myself and the world was the world, so I was silent.
—  Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer

4 months ago · 15 notes

Just because you’re an atheist, that doesn’t mean you wouldn’t love for things to have reasons for why they are.
—  Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer

4 months ago · 5 notes

I have no need for the past, I thought, like a child. I did not consider that the past might have a need for me.
—  Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer 

4 months ago · 17 notes

I zipped myself all the way into the sleeping bag of myself, not because I was hurt, and not because I had broken something, but because they were cracking up.
—  Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close ― Jonathan Safran Foer

4 months ago · 6 notes

I thought about life, about my life, the embarrassments, the little coincidences, the shadows of alarm clocks on bedside tables, I thought about my small victories and everything I’d seen destroyed. I’d swum through mink coats on my parents’ bed while they hosted downstairs, I’d lost the only person with whom I could have spent my only life, I’d left behind a thousand tonnes of marble from which I could have released sculptures, I could have released myself from the marble of myself, I’d experienced joy, but not nearly enough, could there be enough? The end of suffering does not justify the suffering, and so there is no end to suffering, what a mess I am, I thought, what a fool, how foolish and narrow, how worthless, how pinched and pathetic, how helpless in the universe. None of my pets knows their own name. What kind of person am I?
—  Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer

4 months ago · 1 note

Does it break my heart, of course, every moment of every day, into more pieces than my heart was made of, I never thought of myself as quiet, much less silent, I never thought about things at all, everything changed, the distance that wedged itself between me and my happiness wasn’t the world, it wasn’t the bombs and burning buildings, it was me, my thinking, the cancer of never letting go, is ignorance bliss, I don’t know, but it’s so painful to think, and tell me, what did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever bring me? I think and think and think, I’ve thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.
—  

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer

“I’ve thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.”

4 months ago · 3 notes

growing-orbits:

“I thought about all of the things that everyone ever says to each other, and how everyone is going to die, whether it’s in a millisecond, or days, or months, or 76.5 years, if you were just born. Everything that’s born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they’re all on fire, and we’re all trapped.”  

Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

—

Well, the 10th Anniversary 9/11 documentary ‘season’ has begun… I have been dreading it. I cannot stand our fascination with seeing those towers falling over and over again on loop for ten years… an event which should have brought out the best in our humanity has instead, in its legacy of war and media obsession, only brought out the worst.

I do not want to see those towers falling forever.

by memoriesofmymelancholy

8 months ago · 26 notes · Source · Reblogged from growing-orbits