Of course food has an important cultural use in families, but there are things that have more important cultural uses in families, and broadening the conversation out simply from what’s reasonable also allows in other things.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERFood serves two parallel purposes: it nourishes and it helps you remember. Eating and storytelling are inseparable-the saltwater is also tears; the honey not only tastes sweet, but makes us think of sweetness; the matzo is the bread of our affliction.
More Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes
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While it is always possible to wake a person who’s sleeping, no amount of noise will wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.
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We believed in our grandmother’s cooking more fervently than we believed in God.
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The bruises go away, and so does how you hate, and so does the feeling that everything you receive from life is something you have earned.
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Not responding is a response – we are equally responsible for what we don’t do.
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Songs are as sad as the listener.
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Thanksgiving is the holiday that encompasses all others. All of them, from Martin Luther King Day to Arbor Day to Christmas to Valentine’s Day, are in one way or another about being thankful.
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Feeding my children is not like feeding myself: it matters more.
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Every moment before this one depends on this one.
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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.
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Worthy would-be worlds of words, whorls of working wonder.
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I didn’t feel empty. I wished I’d felt empty. … I wanted to be empty like an overturned pitcher. But I was full like a stone.
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Shyness is when you turn your head away from something you want.
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When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own.
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I think and think and think, I‘ve thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.
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Why are you leaving me? He wrote, I do not know how to live. I do not know either but I am trying. I do not know how to try. There were some things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him. So i buried them and let them hurt me
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