"I knew why he was little less than crying. I knew very well, and I wanted to go to him and tell him that I had a little less than cried, too, just like him, and that no matter how much it seemed like he would never grow up to be a premium person like me, with many girls and so many famous places to go, he would. He would be exactly like me. And look at me, little Igor, the bruises go away, and so does how you hate, and so does the feeling that everything you receive in life is something you have earned."

"I wouldn't want a boy to think I was pretty unless he was the kind of boy who thought I was pretty."

"'I want to do something I'm not ashamed of.'
'Something you are proud of, yes?'
'Not even. I just don't want to be ashamed.'"

"Her life was an urgent desperate struggle to justify her life."

"Brod's life was a slow realization that the world was not for her, and that for whatever reason, she would never be happy and honest at the same time. She felt as if she were brimming, always producing and hoarding more love inside her. But there was no release...She addressed her world honestly, searching for something deserving of the volumes of love she knew she had within her, but to each she would have to say 'I don't love you.'...Nothing felt like anything more than what it actually was."

"Love me, because love doesn't exist and I've tried everything that does."

"They knew intimately the aspects of themselves in the other, but never the other."

"They reciprocated the great and saving lie- that our love for things was greater than our love for our love for things- willingly playing the parts they wrote for themselves, creating and believing fictions necessary for life."

"She avoids mirrors, and lifts a powerful telescope to find herself."

"Love, in your writing, is the immovability of truth."

"Life was a small negative space cut out of the eternal solidity, and for the first time, it felt precious- not like all of the words that had come to mean nothing, but like the last breath of a drowning victim."

"This is about choosing...You are the only person 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."

from Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer