I'd Like An Order Of Bon Mots, Please

So. Rather late to the party, I am reading Jonathan Safran Foer's new book, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.

I am in awe.

The writing is so imaginative. The narrator, Oskar Schell, has a voice that is thick with ideas. He imagines a skyscraper where the elevator stays in place and the building goes up and down. He imagines a system where a passing ambulance would be able to detect someone important to the patient inside and flash "DON'T WORRY. DON'T WORRY." But if it was serious, and the patient was at risk of dying, the sign would flash "GOODBYE. I LOVE YOU. GOODBYE. I LOVE YOU."

There is a phrase, a small throw-away line in the middle of a paragraph where Oskar is trying to reach something on a shelf that is too high. He pulls in a chair, but that's not high enough. So he goes to get his complete works of Shakespeare and I brought those over, four tragedies at a time, until I had a stack that was tall enough. I stood on all of that and it worked for a second. But then I had the tips of my fingers on the vase, and the tragedies started to wobble..."

I mean, how can someone take such a marvelous metaphor, and just toss it off like that? I swear if I'd come up with that metaphor, I'd have bashed it into the ground, because when would I ever get another one that good?

But Jonathan Safran Foer can just treat it lightly, because he has so many more.

It's enough to discourage an aspiring writer.