Not responding is a response–we are equally responsible for what we don’t do. In the case of animal slaughter, to throw your hands in the air is to wrap your fingers around a knife handle.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERThe mistakes I’ve made are dead to me. But I can’t take back the things I never did.
More Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes
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Food 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.
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Tomorrow was over the horizon, and would take an entire day to reach.
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I can forgive you for leaving, but not for coming back.
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The animals are those things that God likes but doesn’t love.
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Songs are as sad as the listener.
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It was one of the best days of my life, a day during which I lived my life and didn’t think about my life at all.
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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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I shook my tambourine the whole time, because it helped me remember that even though I was going through different neighborhoods, I was still me.
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There are still many different ways to get stuck, existentially stuck. Feeling like, “This is worthless. I’m wasting my time, and I would be wasting the time of someone who tried to read this.” It happens all the time.
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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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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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Time was passing like a hand waving from a train that I wanted to be on.
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You are the only one who has understood even a whisper of me, and I will tell you that I am the only person who has understood even a whisper of you.
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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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We live in a world made up more of story than stuff. We are creatures of memory more than reminders, of love more than likes.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER






