21
" I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others—the only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad. I am not sad. I am not sad. Because his life had unlimited potential for happiness, insofar as it was an empty white room. He would fall asleep with his heart at the foot of his bed, like some domesticated animal that was no part of him at all. And each morning he would wake with it again in the cupboard of his rib cage, having become a little heavier, a little weaker, but still pumping. And by the midafternoon he was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else. I am not sad. "
― Jonathan Safran Foer , Everything Is Illuminated
37
" The dream that
we are our fathers. I walked to the Brod,
41
without knowing why, and looked into
my reflection in the water. I couldn’t look
away. What was the image that pulled me
in after it? What was it that I loved? And
then I recognized it. So simple. In the
water I saw my father’s face, and that face
saw the face of its father, and so on, and so
on, reflecting backward to the beginning
of time, to the face of God, in whose
image we were created. We burned with
love for ourselves, all of us, starters of
the fire we suffered—our love was the affliction
for which only our love was the
cure . . . "
― Jonathan Safran Foer , Everything Is Illuminated