“It’s so hard to express yourself.”
“I understand this.”
“I want to express myself.”
“The same is true for me.”
“I’m looking for my voice.”
“It’s in your mouth.”
“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.”
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated
If there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it walls, and we will furnish it with soft, red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweller’s felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn’t exist, and I have tried everything that does.
© Carlotta Marelli with CCLicense
I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others—the only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad. I am not sad. I am not sad. Because his life had unlimited potential for happiness, insofar as it was an empty white room. He would fall asleep with his heart at the foot of his bed, like some domesticated animal that was no part of him at all. And each morning he would wake with it again in the cupboard of his rib cage, having become a little heavier, a little weaker, but still pumping. And by the midafternoon he was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else. I am not sad.
―Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated
© Tela Chhe with CCLicense
Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.
―Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Haktong-ni area, Korea. August 28, 1950.
Public Domain Image by Sfc. Al Chang, US Army
That is what death is like. It doesn’t matter what uniforms the soldiers are wearing. It doesn’t matter how good the weapons are. I thought if everyone could see what I saw, we would never have war anymore.
―Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Ortelius World Map, 1570
A map such as that one is worth many hundreds, and as luck will have it, thousands of dollars. But more than this, it is a remembrance of that time before our planet was so small. When this map was made, I thought, you could live without knowing where you were not living.