Words never mean what we want them to mean.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERI looked at everyone and wondered where they came from, and who they missed, and what they were sorry for.
More Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes
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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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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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If we communicated with something like music, we would never be misunderstood, because there is nothing in music to understand.
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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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We are lying to ourselves and to each other. Lying about what? I don’t care if we’re lying. I am a bad person. I don’t care. I don’t care what you are.
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Am I such a bad person for dreaming of a world that ends when I do? I don’t mean the world ending with respect to me, but every set of eyes closing with mine.
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Also, I designed a pretty fascinating bracelet, where you put a rubber band around your favorite book of poems for a year, and then you take it off and wear it.
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Every moment before this one depends on this one.
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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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Time was passing like a hand waving from a train that I wanted to be on.
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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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I was more alone than if I had been alone.
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She let out a laugh, and then she put her hand over her mouth, like she was angry at herself for forgetting her sadness.
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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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Memory was supposed to fill the time, but it made time a hole to be filled.
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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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When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own.
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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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It is not a thing that you can imagine. It only is. After that, there can be no imagining.
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One hundred years of joy can be erased in one second.
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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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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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We had everything to say to each other, but no ways to say it.
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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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In the morning, when the nothing vase casts a something shadow, like the memory of someone you’ve lost, what can you say about that?
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I wish my days could be washed away like the chalk lines of my days.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER