extremely loud & incredibly close

"That would be so weird, except that the place in the hospital where babies are born would sound like a crystal chandelier in a houseboat, because the babies wouldn't have time to match up their heartbeats yet. And at the finish line at the end of the New York City Marathon it would sound like war." (1)

"Even though it was incredibly sad day, she looked so, so beautiful. I kept trying to figure out a way to tell her that, but all of the ways I thought were weird and wrong. She was wearing the bracelet that I made for her, and that made me feel like one hundred dollars." (7)

"Can't you even tell me if I'm on the right track?" Buckminster purred, and Dad shrugged his shoulders. "But if you don't tell me anything, how can I ever be right?" He circled something in an article and said, "Another way of looking at it would be, how could you ever be wrong?" (9)

"Being with him made my brain quiet. I didn't have to invent anything." pg. 12

"I watched the fireflies of his thoughts orbit his head." (13)

"I've thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it." pg. (17)

"You look upset, is anything wrong?" I wanted to say, "Of course," I wanted to ask, "Is anything right?" I wanted to pull the thread, unravel the scarf of my silence and start again from the beginning, but instead I said, "I." (17)

"... she cried and cried and cried, there weren't any napkins nearby, so I ripped the page from my book -- I don't speak. I'm sorry -- and used it to dry her cheeks, my explanation and apology ran down her face like mascara..." (31)

"I asked my schoolmate Mary to write a letter to me. She was funny and full of life. She liked to run around her empty house without any clothes on, even once she was too old for that. Nothing embarrassed her. I admired that so much, because everything embarrassed me, and that hurt me. She loved to jump on her bed. She jumped on her bed for so many years that one afternoon, while I watched her jump, the seams burst. Feathers filled the room. Our laughter kept the feathers in the air. I thought about birds. Could they fly if there wasn't someone, somewhere laughing?" (78)

"I have no need for the past, I thought..." (78)

"Their length could not be measured in years, just as an ocean could not explain the distance we had traveled, just as the dead can never be counted." (81)

"I wanted to run away from him, and I wanted to go to him.
I went to him." (82)

"It was the first time I had ever made love. I wondered if he knew that. It felt like crying." (84)

"I told her, "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."" (99)

"I like to see people reunited, maybe that's a silly thing, but what can I say, I like to see people run to each other, I like the kissing and the crying, I like the impatience, the stories that the mouth can't tell fast enough, the ears that aren't big enough, the eyes that can't take in all of the change, I like the hugging, the bringing together, the end of missing someone, I sit on the side with a coffee and write in my day book..." (109)

""There's nothing wrong with not understanding yourself," she saw through the shell of me into the center of me." (113)

"I hated myself for going. Why couldn't I be the kind of person who stays?" (114)

"I further convinced myself that she had thought badly of me, or worse, she hadn't thought of me at all." (116)

"We stopped laughing, I took the world into me, rearranged it, and sent it back out as a question: "Do you like me?"" (117)

"... 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..." (130)

"... I was missing her already, I wasn't having second thoughts, but I was having thoughts..." (132)

"I felt, that night, on stage, under that skull, 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?" (145)

""There are more places you haven't heard of than you've heard of!" I loved that." pg. (154)

"It's not a horrible world," he told me, putting a Cambodian mask on his face, "but it's filled with a lot of horrible people!"" (156)

"What if the water that came out of the shower was treated with a chemical that responded to the combination of things, like your heartbeat, and your body temperature, and your brain waves, so that your skin changed color according to your mood? If you were extremely excited your skin would turn green, and if you were angry you'd turn red, and obviously, is you felt like shiitake you'd turn brown, and if you were blue you'd turn blue.
Everyone could know what everyone else felt, and we could be more careful with each other, because you'd never want to tell a person whose skin was purple that you're angry at her for being late, just like you would want to pat a pink person on the back and tell him, "Congratulations!"" (163)

"I missed you even when I was with you. That's been my problem. I miss what I already have, and I surrounded myself with things that are missing." (174)

"I never confused what I had with what I was." (174)

"The water was gray with all of his days." (180)

"Not worn out, but worn through. Like one of those wives who wakes up one morning and says I can't bake any more bread." (180)

"You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness." (180)

"Touching him was always so important to me. It was something I lived for. I could never explain why. Little, nothing touches. My fingers against his shoulder. The outside of our thighs touching as we squeezed together on the bus. I couldn't explain it, but I needed it. Sometimes I imagined stitching all of our little touches together. How many thousands of fingers brushing against each other does it to make love." (181)

"I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live, Oskar. Because if I were able to live my life again, I would do things differently." (184)

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

""The boy asked the girl to say 'I love you' into her can, giving her no further explanation.
"And she didn't ask for any, or say "That's silly," or 'We're too young for love,' or even suggest that she was saying 'I love you' because he asked her to. Instead she said 'I love you.' The words traveled the yo-yo, the doll, the diary, the necklace, the quilt, the clothesline, the birthday present, the harp, the tea bag, the tennis racket, the hem of the skirt he one day would have pulled from her body... The boy covered his can with a lid, removed it from the string, and put her love for him on a shelf in his closet. Of course, he never could open the can, because then he would lose its contents. It was enough just to know it was there."" (220)

""...The gavels of frozen judges are frozen between guilt and innocence. On the ground are the crystals of the frozen first breaths of babies, and those of the last gasps of the dying. On a frozen shelf, in a closet frozen shut, is a can with a voice in it."" (223)

"Time was passing like a hand waving from a train that I wanted to be on." pg. 224

"We all rode in the limousine together. I could not stop touching you. I could not touch you enough. I needed more hands." (232)

"I looked at everyone and wondered where they came, and who they missed, and what they were sorry for." (247)

"She said, "I know about this building because I love this building." That gave me heavy boots, because it reminded me of the lock that I still hadn't found, and how until I found it, I didn't love Dad enough. "What is it about this building?" Mr Black asked. She said, "If I had an answer, it wouldn't really be love, would it?" (251)

"I broke my life down into letters, for love I pressed "5, 6, 8, 3," for death, "3, 3, 2, 8, 4,"when the suffering is subtracted from the joy, what remains? What, I wondered, is the sum of my life?" (269)

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

"... I want an infinitely long blank book and the rest of time..." (279)

"Poor child, telling everything to a stranger, 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..." (280)

"I wanted to touch him, to tell him that even if everyone left everyone, I would never leave him, he talked and talked, his words fell through him, trying to find the floor of his sadness..." (280)

"Or I would have told him about how Dad called when I was home. But I didn't know, just like I didn't know it was the last time Dad would ever tuck me in, because you never know." (286)

"I liked watching the baby make fists. I wondered if he could have thoughts, or if he was more like a nonhuman animal." (287)

""I wanted to hurt him." "Why?" "Because he had hurt me." "Why?" "Because people hurt each other. That's what people do." "It's not what I do." "I know."" (290)

"I wonder if your posters and my mom's posters were ever close to each other." (299)

"In my dream, painters separated green into yellow and blue.
Brown into the rainbow.
Children pulled color from coloring books with crayons, and mothers who had lost children mended their black clothing with scissors. I think about all of the things I've done, Oskar. And all of the things I didn't do. The mistakes I've made are dead to me. But I can't take back the things I never did." (309)

"I wanted to be with him.
Or anyone.
I don't know if I've ever loved your grandfather.
But I've loved not being alone.
I got very close to him.
I wanted to shout myself into his ear.
I touched his shoulder.
He lowered his head." (309)

"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" (314)

"It was so dark that it was even hard to hear." (319)

"I wondered how many things had died since the first thing was born. A trillion? A googolplex?" (319)

""Life is scarier than death."" (322)

"I cried some more. I wanted to tell her all of the lies that I'd told her. And then I wanted her to tell me that it was OK, because sometimes you have to do something bad to do something good." (324)

"I felt in the space between the bed and the wall, and found Stuff That Happened To Me. It was completely full. I was going to have to start a new volume soon. I read that it was the paper that kept the towers burning. All of those notepads, and Xeroxes, and printed e-mails, and photographs of kids, and books, and dollar bills in wallets, and documents in files... all of them were fuel. Maybe if we lived in a paperless society, which lots of scientists say we'll probably live in one day soon, Dad would still be alive. Maybe I shouldn't start a new volume." (325)