Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes About Sleep
-
Every widow wakes one morning, perhaps after years of pure and unwavering grieving, to realize she slept a good night's sleep, and will be able to eat breakfast, and doesn't hear her husband's ghost all the time, but only some of the time. Her grief is replaced with a useful sadness. Every parent who loses a child finds a way to laugh again. The timbre begins to fade. The edge dulls. The hurt lessens. Every love is carved from loss. Mine was. Yours is. Your great-great-great-grandchildren's will be. But we learn to live in that love.
→ -
In bed that night I invented a special drain that would be underneath every pillow in New York, and would connect to the reservoir. Whenever people cried themselves to sleep, the tears would all go to the same place, and in the morning the weatherman could report if the water level of the Reservoir of Tears had gone up or down, and you could know if New York is in heavy boots.
→ -
Every night before putting her to sleep, Yankel counts her ribs, as if one might have disappeared in the course of the day and become the seed and soil for some new companion to steal her away from him.
→ -
It was inevitable: Yankel fell in love with his never-wife. He would wake from sleep to miss the weight that never depressed the bed next to him, remember in earnest the weight of gestures she never made, long for the un-weight of her un-arm slung over his too-real chest, making his widower's rememberences that much more convincing and his pain that much more real.
→ -
I zipped myself all the way into the sleeping bag of myself, not because I was hurt, and not because I had broken something, but because they were cracking up.
→ -
The disgraced Usurer Yankel D took the baby girl home that evening... He made a bed of crumpled newspaper in a deep baking pan and gently tucked it in the oven, so that she wouldn't be disturbed by the noise of the small falls outside... When he pulled her out to feed her or just hold her, her body was tattooed with the newsprint... Sometimes he would rock her to sleep in his arms, and read her left to right, and know everything he needed to know about the world. If it wasn't written on her, it wasn't important to him.
→ -
While it is always possible to wake a person who's sleeping, no amount of noise will wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.
→ -
...he enclosed pieces of string that he used to measure out his body--his head, thigh, forearm, finger, neck, everything. He wanted me to sleep with them under my pillow. He said that when he came back, we would remeasure his body against the string as proof that he hadn't changed.
→
Related Authors
-
Philip Roth Novelist -
Stephen Daldry Director -
Eugene Hutz Singer -
Siri Hustvedt Novelist -
Jonathan Franzen Novelist -
Joyce Carol Oates Author -
Dave Eggers Writer -
Elijah Wood Actor -
Thomas Horn Film actor -
Joshua Foer Journalist -
Chuck Palahniuk Novelist -
Nicole Krauss Author -
Michael Chabon Author -
David Foster Wallace Novelist -
Kurt Vonnegut Writer -
J. D. Salinger Writer -
Ian Mcewan Novelist -
Franklin Foer Journalist -
Bruno Schulz Writer