Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

"I thought about life, about my life, the embarrassments, the little coincidences, the shadows of alarm clocks on bedside tables. I thought about my small victories and everything I'd seen destroyed, I'd swum through mink coats on my parents' bed while they hosted downstairs, I'd lost the only person I could have spent my only life with, I'd left behind a thousand tons of marble, I could have released sculptures, I could have released myself from the marble of myself. I'd experienced joy, but not nearly enough, could there be enough? The end of suffering does not justify the suffering, and so there is no end to suffering, what a mess I am, I thought, what a fool, and how foolish and narrow, how worthless, how pinched and pathetic, how helpless."

"I hope you never love anything as much as I love you."

"In the end, everyone loses everyone."

"Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living."

"Held in the palm of our half hour together were one hundred million arguments, and impossible admissions, and silences."

"I probably should have cried, I should have drowned us there in the room, ended our suffering, they would have found us floating face-down in two thousand white pages, or buried under the salt of my evaporated tears."

"I thought, it's a shame that we have to live, but it's a tragedy that we get to live only one life, because if I'd had two lives, I would have spent one of them with her."

"Years were passing through the spaces between moments."

"I heard the roar of that baby's silence."

"Can lions love?"

"How did that boy making love behind that shed become this man writing this letter at this table?"

"On a frozen shelf, in a closet frozen shut, is a can with a voice in it."

"Time was passing like a hand waving from a train that I wanted to be on ... I hope you never think about anything as much as I think about you."

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

"Lovers pulled up each other's underwear, button each other's shirts, and dressed and dressed and dressed."