Nuggets from ""EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE"

“I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live.”

“There were things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him. So I buried them, and let them hurt me.”

“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 kit in the hall closet.”

“Songs are as sad as the listener.”

“I missed you even when I was with you. That’s been my problem. I miss what I already have, and I surround myself with things that are missing.”

“In bed that night I invented a special drain that would be underneath every pillow in New York, and would connect to the reservoir. Whenever people cried themselves to sleep, the tears would all go to the same place, and in the morning the weatherman could report if the water level of the Reservoir of Tears had gone up or down, and you could know if New York is in heavy boots.”

“We had everything to say to each other, but no ways to say it”

“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.”

"What's so great about feeling and dreaming?"

“I took the world into me, rearranged it, and sent it back out as a question: "Do you like me?”

“You can't love anything more than something you miss.”

“The end of suffering does not justify the suffering, and so there is no end to suffering.”

“Mom told me, “It probably gets pretty lonely to be Grandma, don’t you think?” I told her, “It probably gets pretty lonely to be anyone.”

“But I still couldn't figure out what it all meant. The more I found out, the less I understood.”

“He promised us that everything would be okay. I was a child, but I knew that everything would not be okay. That did not make my father a liar. It made him my father.”

“Every moment before this one depends on this one.”

“There's nothing wrong with not understanding yourself.”

“Even if I don't like what I am, I know what I am. My children like what they are, but they don't know what they are. So tell me which is worse.”

“We talked about nothing in particular, but it felt like we were talking about the most important things...”

"And how can you say I love you to someone you love? "

“Why I'm Not Where You Are”

“It was one of the best days of my life, a day during which I lived my life and didn't think about my life at all.”

When Dad was tucking me in that night and we were talking about the book, I asked if he could think of a solution to that problem. "Which problem?" "The problem of how relatively insignificant we are." He said, "Well, what would happen if a plane dropped you in the middle of the Sahara Desert and you picked up a single grain of sand with tweezers and moved it one millimeter?" I said, "I'd probably die of dehydration." He said, "I just mean right then, when you moved that single grain of sand. What would that mean?" I said, "I dunno, what?" He said, "Think about it." I thought about it. "I guess I would have moved one grain of sand." "Which would mean?" "Which would mean I moved a grain of sand?" "Which would mean you changed the Sahara." "So?" "So? So the Sahara is a vast desert. And it has existed for millions of years. And you changed it!" "That's true!" I said, sitting up. "I changed the Sahara!" "Which means?" he said. "What? Tell me."
"Well I'm not talking about painting the Mona Lisa or curing cancer. I'm just talking about moving that one grain of sand one millimeter." "Yeah? If you hadn't done it, human history would have been one way..." "Uh-huh?" "But you did do it, so...?" I stood on the bed, pointing one of my fingers at the fake stars, and screamed: "I changed the course of human history!" "That's right." "I changed the universe!" "You did." "I'm God!" "You're an atheist." "I don't exist!" I fell back onto the bed, into his arms, and we cracked up together.”

― Jonathan Safran Foer

Above are excerpts from the novel-

"EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE" by 2005 novel by Jonathan Safran Foer. On the challenges of writing a novel in a child's voice, Foer responded, "It's not the voice of a child exactly, " adding that

"in order to create this thing that feels most real, it's usually not by actually giving the most accurate presentation of it." Film adaptation- Jeopardy! Kids Week winner Thomas Horn, 12.