The more you love someone, he came to think, the harder it is to tell them. It surprised him that strangers didn’t stop each other on the street to say I love you.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOEREverything that’s born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they’re all on fire, and we’re all trapped.
More Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes
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My life story is the story of everyone I’ve ever met.
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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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Choosing leaf or flesh, factory farm or family farm, does not in itself change the world, but teaching ourselves, our children, our local communities, and our nation to choose conscience over ease can.
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I felt, that night, on that stage, under that skull, incredibly close to everything in the universe, but also extremely alone.
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We often use technology to save time, but increasingly, it either takes the saved time along with it, or makes the saved time less present, intimate and rich. I worry that the closer the world gets to our fingertips, the further it gets from our hearts.
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She said, “Do you have more things that you need, or more that you don’t need?” I said, “It depends on what it means to need.
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Everything else happened – why not the things that could have?
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My 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.
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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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We 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.
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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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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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I want an infinitely blank book and the rest of time.
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Isn’t it strange how upset people get about a few dozen baseball players taking growth hormones, when we’re doing what we’re doing to our food animals and feeding them to our children?
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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.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER