“When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calendar that showed the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did. Where the smoke from the chimney ended. How an overturned bottle rested at the edge of a table. I spent my life learning to feel less. Every day I felt less. Is that growing old? Or is it something worse? You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.”

American novelist

Jonathan Safran Foer is an American novelist and writer. He is associated with contemporary American fiction and has 239 quotes on the site. He is known for the novels Everything Is Illuminated, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, and Here I Am, as well as the non-fiction works Eating Animals and We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast. He also teaches creative writing at New York University. His writing often moves between fiction and nonfiction, with attention to family, memory, and environmental concern.