Book detail: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel is presented as a focused source page for quotations connected with this book, collection, transcript, or source record.
This novel delves into the emotional journey of a young boy who grapples with his father's sudden death in the tragic events of September 11, 2001. Through his quest to understand the world and the legacy of his father, the story explores themes of grief, memory, and the human capacity to heal.
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“I flipped back through the pad of paper while I thought about what Stephen Hawking would do next.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“Cher Marcel, Allô. I am Oskar's mom. I have thought about it a ton, and I have decided that it isn't obvious why Oskar should go to French lessons, so he will no longer be going to go see you on Sundays like he used to. I want to thank you very much for everything you have taught Oskar, particularly the conditional tense, which is weird. Obviously, there's no need to call me when Oskar doesn't come to his lessons, because I already know, because this was my decision. Also, I will keep sending you checks, because you are a nice guy. Votre ami dévouée, Mademoiselle Schell.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“The secret was a hole in the middle of me that every happy thing fell into.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“In the end, everyone loses everyone. There was no invention to get around that, and so I felt, that night, like the turtle that everything else in the universe was on top of.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“It was the first time I had ever made love. I wondered if he knew that. It felt like crying. I wondered, Why does anyone ever make love?”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“There is nothing wrong with compromising. Even if you compromise almost everything.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“I could tell that Mom was dreaming, but I didn't want to know what she was dreaming about, because I had enough of my own nightmares, and if she had been dreaming something happy, I would have been angry at her for dreaming something happy.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“I never confused what I had with what I was.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“I felt suddenly shy. I was not used to shy. I was used to shame. Shyness is when you turn your head away from something you want. Shame is when you turn your head away from something you do not want.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“There were things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him. So I buried them, and let them hurt me.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“Why didn't he say goodbye? I gave myself a bruise. Why didn't he say 'I love you'?”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“I said, 'I need to know how he died.' He flipped back and pointed at, 'Why?' So I can stop inventing how he died. I'm always inventing.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“I thought about all of the things that everyone ever says to each other, and how everyone is going to die, whether it's in a millisecond, or days, or months, or 76.5 years, if you were just born. Everything that's born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they're all on fire, and we're all trapped.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“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 to his sadness.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“Also, I designed a pretty fascinating bracelet, where you put a rubber band around your favorite book of poems for a year, and then you take it off and wear it.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“We cracked up together, which was necessary, because she loved me again.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“My life story is the story of everyone I've ever met.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“We laughed and laughed, together and separately, out loud and silently, we were determined to ignore whatever needed to be ignored, to build a new world from nothing if nothing in our world could be salvaged, it was one of the best days of my life, a day during which I lived my life and didn't think about my life at all.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“So many people enter and leave your life! Hundreds of thousands of people! You have to keep the door open so they can come in! But it also means you have to let them go!”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“We were trying to make our lives easier, trying, with all our rules, to make life effortless. But a friction began to arise between Nothing and Something, in the morning the Nothing vase cast a Something shadow, like the memory of someone you've lost, what can you say about that, at night the Nothing light spilled from the guest room spilled under the Nothing door and stained the Something hallway, there's nothing to say.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“And also, there are so many times when you need to make a quick escape, but humans don't have their own wings, or not yet, anyway, so what about a birdseed shirt?”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“Mom told me, “It probably gets pretty lonely to be Grandma, don’t you think?” I told her, “It probably gets pretty lonely to be anyone”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“We were quiet on the car ride home. I turned on the radio and found a station playing "Hey Jude." It was true, I didn't want to make it bad. I wanted to take the sad song and make it better. It's just that I didn't know how.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“I did not need to know if he could love me. I needed to know if he could need me.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“and i wouldn't say no to something sweet.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“Each day has been chained to the previous one. But the weeks have wings. Anyone who believes that a second is faster than a decade did not live my life.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“I wanted to cry but I didn't, I probably should have cried, I should have drowned us there in the room ending our suffering.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“Anyway, the fascinating thing was that I read in National Geographic that there are more people alive now than have died in all of human history. In other words, if everyone wanted to play Hamlet at once, they couldn’t, because there aren’t enough skulls!”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“We shared the smile of recognizing ourselves in each other, how many imposters do I have? Do we all make the same mistakes, or has one of us gotten it right, or even just a bit less wrong, am I the imposter?”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“Instead of singing in the shower, I would write out the lyrics of my favourite songs, the ink would turn the water blue or red or green, and the music would run down my legs.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“We had everything to say to each other, but no ways to say it”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“She wanted more, more slang, more figures of speech, the bee's knees, the cats pajamas, horse of a different color, dog-tired, she wanted to talk like she was born here, like she never came from anywhere else”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“I realized I was on a something island. 'How did I get here,' I wondered, surrounded by Nothing, "and how can I get back?”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“The paper, the stapler, the staples, the tape. It makes me sick. Physical things. Forty years of loving someone becomes staples and tape.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“I hated myself for going, why couldn't I be the kind of person who stays?”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“[S]o if the device of the person in the ambulance detected the device of the person he loved the most, or the person who loved him the most, and the person in the ambulance was really badly hurt, and might even die, the ambulance could flash GOODBYE! I LOVE YOU! GOODBYE! I LOVE YOU!”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“Succotash my Balzac, dipshiitake.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“Everything that's born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they're all on fire, and we're all trapped.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“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.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“...the meaning of my thoughts started to float away from me, like leaves that fall from a tree into a river, I was the tree, the world was the river.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“I wish my days could be washed away like the chalk lines of my days.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“I was more alone than if I had been alone.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“Sometimes you have to put your fears in order.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“Only humans can cry tears.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“I watched the sheets breathe when she breathed, like how Dad used to say that trees inhale when people exhale, because I was too young to understand the truth about biological processes.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“We talked about nothing in particular, but it felt like we were talking about the most important things.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“I wasn’t having second thoughts, but I was having thoughts.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“I put my hand on the doorknob because I thought maybe her hand was on the doorknob on the other side.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
“I missed you even when I was with you. That’s been my problem. I miss what I already have, and I surround myself with things that are missing.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel