Why didn’t I learn to treat everything like it was the last time. My greatest regret was how much I believed in the future.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERI 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.
More Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes
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There’s nothing wrong with not understanding yourself.
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But come. No explaining or mending. Be beside me somewhere.
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Once you hear something, you can never return to the time before you heard it.
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Highs and lows make you feel that things matter, but they’re nothing.” “So what’s something?” “Being reliable is something. Being good.
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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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Memory was supposed to fill the time, but it made time a hole to be filled.
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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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Whether we change our lives or do nothing, we have responded. To do nothing is to do something.
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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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It’s so beautiful at this hour. The sun is low, the shadows are long, the air is cold and clean. You won’t be awake for another five hours, but I can’t help feeling that we’re sharing this clear and beautiful morning.
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It’s hard to say goodbye to the place you’ve lived. It can be as hard as saying goodbye to a person.
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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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What does it remember like?
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I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love.
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I felt suddenly shy. I was not used to shy. I was used to shame. Shyness is when you turn your head away from something you want. Shame is when you turn your head away from something you do not want.
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Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?
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I wish my days could be washed away like the chalk lines of my days.
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I try not to remember the life that I didn’t want to lose but lost and have to remember,
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I want an infinitely blank book and the rest of time.
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I never confused what I had with what I was.
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Words never mean what we want them to mean.
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There were 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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Everything is to protect you. I exist in case you need to be protected.
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So many people enter and leave your life! Hundreds of thousands of people! You have to keep the door open so they can come in! But it also means you have to let them go!
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I tried the key in all the doors, even though he said he didn’t recognize it. It’s not that I didn’t trust him, becuase I did. It’s that at the end of my search I wanted to be able to say: I don’t know how I could have tried harder.
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We aren’t exactly emptying the oceans; it’s more like clear-cutting a forest with thousands of species to create massive fields with one type of soybean.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER