Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Quotes

1. It broke my heart into more pieces than my heart was made of, why can't people say what they mean at the time? (p. 279)

2. 

   "Why do beautiful songs make you sad?" "Because they aren't true." "Never?" "Nothing is beautiful and true." (p. 43)

3. 

   I spent my life learning to feel less.

   Every day I felt less.

   Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?

   You can not protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.

   p. 180

4. 

   He had a wall of masks from every country he‘d been to, like Armenia and Chile and Ethiopia. It‘s not a horrible world, he told me, but it‘s filled with a lot of horrible people.

5. 

   Sometimes I can feel my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living. (p. 113)

6. 

   In the end, everyone loses everyone. There was no invention to get around that, and so I felt, that night, like the turtle that everything else in the universe was on top of. (p. 74)

7. 

   She died in my arms saying, "I don't want to die." 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 could never have war anymore. (p. 189)

8. 

   "Stalin found out about the community and sent his thugs in, just a few days before I got there, to break all of their arms! That was worse than killing them! It was a horrible sight, Oskar: their arms in crude splints, straight in front of them like zombies! They couldn't feed themselves, because they couldn't get their hands to their mouths! So you know what they did!" "They starved?" "They fed each other! That's the difference between heaven and hell! In hell we starve! In heaven we feed each other!" I don't believe in the afterlife." "Neither do I, but I believe in the story."

   p. 142

9. 

   There is nothing wrong with compromising, even if you are compromising almost everything. (p. 175)

10. 

    Shyness is when you turn your head away from something you want. Shame is when you turn your head away from something you do not want.

    p. 179

11. 

    I felt that night, on the stage, incredibly close to everything in the universe, but also extremely alone. I wondered, for the first time in my life, if life was worth all the work it took to live. What exactly made it worth it? What's so horrible about being dead forever, and not feeling anything, and not even dreaming? What's so great about feeling and dreaming? (p. 145)

12. 

    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. (p. 130)

13. 

    "I feel too much. That's what's going on." "Do you think one can feel too much? Or just feel the wrong ways? "My insides don't match up with my outsides." "Do anyone's inside and outsides match up?" "I don't know. I'm only me." "Maybe that's what a person's personality is: the difference between the inside and the outside." "But it's worse for me." "I wonder if everyone thinks it's worse for him." "Probably. But it really is worse for me."

    p. 201

14. 

    Ray Black was in prison, so we weren't able to talk to him. I did some research on the internet and found out that he was in prison because he murdered two children after he raped them. There were also pictures of the dead children, and even though I knew it would only hurt me to look at them, I did. I printed them out and put them in *Stuff That Happened To Me*, right after the picture of Jean-Pierre Haigneré, the french astronaut who had to be carried from his spacecraft after returning form the MIR spacestation, because gravity isn't only what makes us fall, it's what makes our muscles strong.

15. 

    Humans are the only animal that blushes, laughs, has religion, wages war, and kisses with lips. So in a way, the more you kiss with lips, the more human you are. (p. 99)

16. 

    It's the tragedy of loving, you can't love anything more than something you miss. (p. 208)

17. 

    When I was your age, my grandfather bought me a ruby bracelet. It was too big for me and would slide up and down my arm. It was almost a necklace. He later told me that he had asked the jeweler to make it that way. Its size was supposed to be a symbol of his love. More rubies, more love. But I could not wear it comfortably. I could not wear it at all. So here is the point of everything I have been trying to say. If I were to give a bracelet to you, now, I would measure your wrist twice. (p. 79)

18. 

    I wanted to build walls around him, I wanted to separate inside from outside, I wanted to give him an infinitely long blank book and the rest of time. (p. 280)

19. 

    I'm so afraid of losing something I love, that I refuse to love anything. (p. 216)

20. 

    I put my hand on him. Touching him has always been important to me, it was something I lived for. I never could explain why. Little, nothing touches, my fingers against his shoulder, the outsides of our thighs touching as we squeeled together on the bus. I couldnt explain it, but I needed it. Sometimes I imagined stiching all of our little touches together. How many hundreds of thousands of fingers brushing against each other does it take to make love?

21. 

    The mistakes I've made are dead to me. But I can't take back the things I never did. (p. 309)

22. 

    I said, I want to tell you something She said, you can tell me tomorrow I had never told her how much I loved her. She was my sister. We slept in the same bed. There was never a right time to say it. It was always unnecessary. I thought about waking her. But it was unnecessary. There would be other nights. And how can you say I love you to someone you love? I rolled onto my side and fell asleep next to her. Here is the point of everything I have been trying to tell you, Oskar. It's always necessary. I love you. Grandma.

    p. 314

23. 

    So many people enter and leave your life! Hundreds of thousands of people! You have to keep the door open so they can come in! But it also means you have to let them go! (p. 153)

24. 

    I hope you never love anything as much as I love you. (p. 73)

25. 

    "It's easy to be emotional. You can always make a scene... Highs and lows make you feel that things matter, but they're nothing." "So what's something?" "Being reliable is something. Being good."

    p. 297

26. 

    There were things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him, so I buried them, and let them hurt me. (p. 181)

27. 

    That secret was a hole in the middle of me that every happy thing fell into. (p. 71)

28. 

    Time was passing like a hand waving from a train I wanted to be on. I hope you never think about anything as much as I think about you. (p. 224)

29. 

    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, my 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. (p. 17)

That’s all the quotes.

29 quotes in the collection · come back when we add more