Quotations from *Everything Is Illuminated*, 1 of 2
Jonathan Safran Foer
1977- American

He awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounded and as impossible as it actually was, happy. And during the course of each day his heart would descend from his chest into his stomach. By early afternoon he was overcome by the feeling that nothing was right, or nothing was right for him, and by the desire to be alone. By evening he was fulfilled: alone in the magnitude of his grief, alone in his aimless guilt, alone even in his loneliness.
—Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

And by midafternoon he was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else.
—Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

She was like a drowning person, flailing, reaching for anything that might save her. Her life was an urgent, desperate struggle to justify her life.
—Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

She spent an afternoon staring at their front door.
—Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

Quotations from *Everything Is Illuminated*, 2 of 2
Jonathan Safran Foer
1977- American

Nothing felt like anything more than what it actually was. Everything was just a thing, mired completely in its thingness.
—Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

There was no convincing reason to exist.
—Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

Love me, because love doesn’t exist, and I have tried everything that does.
—Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

But each was the closest thing to a deserving recipient of love that the other would find. So they gave each other all of it.
—Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

They reciprocated the great and saving lie—that our love for things is greater than our love for our love for things—willfully playing the parts they wrote for themselves, willfully creating and believing fictions necessary for life.
—Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

If God exists, He is not to be believed in.
—Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated