Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

O sweet, delusive Noon, Which the morning climbs to find, O moment sped too soon, And morning left behind.

Time, where did you go? / Why did you leave me here alone? / Wait, don't go so fast / I'm missing the moments as they pass

I wish my days could be washed away like the chalk lines of my days.

How did it get so late so soon? Its night before its afternoon. December is here before its June. My goodness how the time has flewn. How did it get so late so soon?

Every station I was at, I never said goodbye - when I was in Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, Oakland, and L.A. I don't know why.

For all sad words of tongue and pen, The saddest are these, 'It might have been'.

This is a long goodbye, yet not time enough. I have no aptitude for this. I cannot learn this. I would hold on, and hold on, until my hands clutch at emptiness.

Seems like we always spend the best part of our time just saying goodbye.

No magic. I do believe you might have taken it all with you when you went away.

So sweetly she bade me adieu, I thought that she bade me return.

The perfect moment, once lost, is not easily found again.

There is that might-have-been which is the single rock we cling to above the maelstrom of unbearable reality.

He was only twenty-five.He was young enough to miss his youth just as it was slipping away. The worst kind of loss-the one that is happening as you feel it.

You shoulda left the other day You let me beg for you to stay

Can't bring back time. Like holding water in your hand.

It was not in me It came and went I wanted to hold it It was held by wine (I no longer know what it was)

I was happier then. Or was that I? Or am I now I? Can't bring back time. Like holding water in your hand. Would you go back to then? Just beginning then. Would you?

Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been; I am also call'd No-more, Too-late, Farewell.

And I sat there getting drunker and drunker and more in love and more in love...And you can never touch a girl in the same way more than once, twice, or another number of times however much you may wish to hold, wrap, or otherwise fix her hand, or look, or some other quality, or incident, known to you previously.

Looking out at the road rushing under my wheels. Looking back at the years gone by like so many summer fields.

A memory from my youth comes back to me. You go into the woods on a bike, with a girl. There is the smell of heather, you can hear the wind in the fir trees, you don't dare tell her about your love, but you feel happy, as if you were floating above the ground. Then you look at the clouds beyond the trees and they are fleeting. And you know that within an hour you'll have to go home, that tomorrow will be a working day. You wish you could stop that moment forever, but you can't, it is bound to end. So you take a photo, as if to challenge time.

When I left Merle was wearing a bungalow apron and rolling pie crust. She came to the door wiping her hands on the apron and kissed me on the mouth and began to cry and ran back into the house, leaving the doorway empty [...] I had a funny feeling as I saw the house disappear, as though I had written a poem and it was very good and I had lost it and would never remember it again. (p. 262)