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."

"The more you love someone, he came to think, the harder it is to tell them. It surprised him that strangers didn't stop each other on the street to say I love you."

"I imagine a line, a white line, painted on the sand and on the ocean, from me to you."

"You are the only one who has understood even a whisper of me, and I will tell you that I am the only person who has understood even a whisper of you."

"...and when is enough proof enough?"

"I don't think that there are any limits to how excellent we could make life seem."

"It's true, I am afraid of dying. I am afraid of the world moving forward without me, of my absence going unnoticed, or worse, being some natural force propelling life on. Is it selfish? Am I such a bad person for dreaming of a world that ends when I do? I don't mean the world ending with respect to me, but every set of eyes closing with mine."

"It was not the feeling of completeness I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty."

"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."

"She was a genius of sadness, immersing herself in it, separating its numerous strands, appreciating its subtle nuances. She was a prism through which sadness could be divided into its infinite spectrum."

"I could not believe in a God that would challenge faith like this."

"I will describe my eyes and then begin the story. My eyes are blue and resplendent. Now I will begin the story."

"I could not believe in a God that would challenge faith like this."

"I am always sad, I think. Perhaps this signifies that I am not sad at all, because sadness is something lower than your normal disposition, and I am always the same thing. Perhaps I am the only person in the world, then, who never becomes sad. Perhaps I am lucky."

"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."

"With writing, we have second chances."

"I don't think that there are any limits to how excellent we could make life seem."