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Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes
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But more than that, no unloving words were ever spoken, and everything was held up as another small piece of proof that it can be this way, it doesn't have to be that way; if there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it heavy walls, and we will furnish it with soft red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweler's felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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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.
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We are lying to ourselves and to each other. Lying about what? I don't care if we're lying. I am a bad person. I don't care. I don't care what you are.
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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?
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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.
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Everything is the way it is because everything was the way it was. Sometimes I feel ensnared in this, as if no matter what I do, what will come has already been fixed.
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[...]It is as if after surviving so much, there was no longer reason to survive.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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I could not believe in a God that would challenge faith like this.
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I can't even say 'hair pie,'' I told him, 'unless I'm talking about an actual pie made out of rabbits....
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She wants to know if I love her, that's all anyone wants from anyone else, not love itself but the knowledge that love is there, like new batteries in the flashlight in the emergency kit in the hall closet.
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The animals are those things that God likes but doesn't love.
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I looked at everyone and wondered where they came from, and who they missed, and what they were sorry for.
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SADNESSES OF THE COVENANT: Sadness of God's love; Sadness of God's back [sic]; Favorite-child sadness; Sadness of b[ein]g sad in front of one's God; Sadness of the opposite of belief [sic]; What if? Sadness; Sadness of God alone in heaven; Sadness of a God who would need people to pray to Him...
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People care about animals. I believe that. They just don't want to know or to pay. A fourth of all chickens have stress fractures. It's wrong. They're packed body to body, and can't escape their waste, and never see the sun. Their nails grow around the bars of their cages. It's wrong. They feel their slaughters. It's wrong, and people know it's wrong. They don't have to be convinced. They just have to act differently. I'm not better than anyone, and I'm not trying to convince people to live by my standards of what's right. I'm trying to convince them to live by their own.
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She let out a laugh, and then she put her hand over her mouth, like she was angry at herself for forgetting her sadness.
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She wanted nothing more than someone to miss, to touch, with whom to speak like a child, with whom to be a child.
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The man took my passport and asked me the purpose of my visit, I wrote in my daybook, 'To mourn,' and then, 'To try to live,' he gave me a look and asked if I would consider that business or pleasure, I wrote, 'Neither.' 'For how long do you plan to mourn and try to live?' I wrote, 'For the rest of my life.
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I put my hand on him. Touching him has always been important to me, it was something I lived for. I never could explain why. Little, nothing touches, my fingers against his shoulder, the outsides of our thighs touching as we squeeled together on the bus. I couldnt explain it, but I needed it. Sometimes I imagined stiching all of our little touches together. How many hundreds of thousands of fingers brushing against each other does it take to make love?
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I got incredibly heavy boots about how relatively insignificant life is, and how, compared to the universe and compared to time, it didn't even matter if I existed at all.
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This brings me back to the image of Kafka standing before a fish in the Berlin aquarium, a fish on which his gaze fell in a newly found peace after he decided not to eat animals. Kafka recognized that fish as a member of his invisible family- not as his equal, of course, but as another being that was his concern.
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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-children's will be. But we learn to live with that love.
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Feathers filled the small room. Our laughter kept the feathers in the air. I thought about birds. Could they fly is there wasn't someone, somewhere, laughing?
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This is my heart. You are touching it with your left hand. You are touching it with your left hand, not because you are left-handed, although you might be, but because I am holding it against my heart. What you are feeling is the beating of my heart. It is what keeps me alive.
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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.
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[…] but I believe that things are extremely complicated, and her looking over me was as complicated as anything could ever be. But it was also incredibly simple.
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Quote of the day
The true spirit of conversation consists in building on another man's observation, not overturning it.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Jonathan Safran Foer
Creative Commons
Born:
February 21, 1977
(age 47)
Bio:
Jonathan Safran Foer is an American writer. He is best known for his novels Everything Is Illuminated, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and for his non-fiction work Eating Animals. He teaches creative writing at New York University.
Known for:
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005)
Everything is Illuminated (2002)
Eating Animals (2009)
Tree of Codes (2010)
Here I Am (2016)
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