It has shown me that everything is illuminated in the light of the past. It is always along the side of us…on the inside, looking out.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERIt has shown me that everything is illuminated in the light of the past. It is always along the side of us…on the inside, looking out.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERWe are not long-term beings. Not heroes of romances in many volumes. For one gesture, for one word alone, we shall make the effort. We openly admit: our creations will be temporary. We shall have this as our aim: a gesture.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERThere were things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him. So I buried them, and let them hurt me.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERThere’s nothing wrong with not understanding yourself.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERI wasn’t having second thoughts, but I was having thoughts.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERIt was not the feeling of completeness I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERMemory was supposed to fill the time, but it made time a hole to be filled.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERNo matter how much I feel, I’m not going to let it out. If I have to cry, I’m gonna cry on the inside. If I have to bleed, I’ll bruise. If my heart starts going crazy, I’m not gonna tell everyone in the world about it. It doesn’t help anything. It just makes everyone’s life worse.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERThe more exposure people have to the realities of factory farming, the more we will see people rejecting it. It’s already happening.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERSometimes I imagined stitching all of our little touches together. How many hundreds of thousands of fingers brushing against each other does it take to make love? Why does anyone ever make love?
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERThe philosopher Elaine Scarry has observed that “beauty always takes place in the particular.” Cruelty, on the other hand, prefers abstraction.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERI can forgive you for leaving, but not for coming back.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERBut 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.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERI felt, that night, on that stage, under that skull, incredibly close to everything in the universe, but also extremely alone.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERWe 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.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERMy point is that there are a lot of forces, like the media and the general political rhetoric tells us we should have more. That we should do better than our parents and have a bigger house or a better car.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER