It was not the feeling of completeness I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOEROnce you hear something, you can never return to the time before you heard it.
More Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes
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Every night before putting her to sleep, Yankel counts her ribs, as if one might have disappeared in the course of the day and become the seed and soil for some new companion to steal her away from him.
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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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Sometimes people who seem good end up being not as good as you might have hoped, you know?
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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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Art can be very political but that can’t be the purpose of art, it can’t be the driving force. It isn’t with any of the books that I love, anyway.
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Ninety-nine percent of all land animals eaten or used to produce milk and eggs in the United States are factory farmed. So although there are important exceptions, to speak about eating animals today is to speak about factory farming.
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Whether we change our lives or do nothing, we have responded. To do nothing is to do something.
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I can forgive you for leaving, but not for coming back.
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One day you will do things for me that you hate. That is what it means to be family.
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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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She was with me. She did all of those things and so many more, things I would never tell anyone, and she never even loved me. Now that’s love.
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Memory was supposed to fill the time, but it made time a hole to be filled.
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We believed in our grandmother’s cooking more fervently than we believed in God.
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She had fallen in love so many times that she began to suspect she was not falling in love at all, but doing something much more ordinary.
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We had everything to say to each other, but no ways to say it.
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Once you hear something, you can never return to the time before you heard it.
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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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If we communicated with something like music, we would never be misunderstood, because there is nothing in music to understand.
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The animals are those things that God likes but doesn’t love.
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I am sure people tell you this constantly but if you looked up ‘incredibly beautiful’ in the dictionary there would be a picture of you.
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You can call your turkey organic and torture it daily.
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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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Everything 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.
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Every moment before this one depends on this one.
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As long as I am thinking, I am alive.
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Sometimes you have to put your fears in order.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER