We believed in our grandmother’s cooking more fervently than we believed in God.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERHe was someone whom everyone admired and liked but whom nobody knew. He was like a book that you could feel good holding, that you could talk about without ever having read, that you could recommend.
More Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes
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I dreamt four nights ago of clock hands descending from the universe like rain, of the moon as a green eye, of mirrors and insects, of a love that never withdrew. It was not the feeling of completeness that I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty.
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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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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.
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Words are capable of making experience more vivid, and also of organizing it. They can scare us, and they can comfort us.
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Part of living your life is an awareness of the opportunities that can be missed and an awareness that time moves in one direction.
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When I looked at you, my life made sense. Even the bad things made sense. They were necessary to make you possible.
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Food for her is not food, it is terror, dignity, gratitude, vengeance, joyfulness, humiliation, religion, history, and, of course, love. As if the fruit she always offered us were picked from the destroyed brances of out family tree.
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Memory was supposed to fill the time, but it made time a hole to be filled. Each second was two hundred yards, to be walked, crawled. You couldn’t see the next hour, it was so far in the distance. Tomorrow was over the horizon, and would take an entire day to reach.
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Silently the animal catches our glance. The animal looks at us, and whether we look away or not, we are exposed. Whether we change our lives or do nothing, we have responded. To do nothing is to do something.
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Please be truthful, but also please be benevolent, please.
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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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I’m sorry for my inability to let unimportant things go, for my inability to hold on to the important things.
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Fiction works when it makes a reader feel something strongly.
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I imagine a line, a white line, painted on the sand and on the ocean, from me to you.
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Cruelty depends on an understanding of cruelty, and the ability to choose against it. Or to choose to ignore it.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER