I can only hold on to the things I want to lose.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERIt has shown me that everything is illuminated in the light of the past. It is always along the side of us…on the inside, looking out.
More Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes
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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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Of course food has an important cultural use in families, but there are things that have more important cultural uses in families, and broadening the conversation out simply from what’s reasonable also allows in other things.
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Only humans can cry tears.
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Sometimes I imagined stitching all of our little touches together. How many hundreds of thousands of fingers brushing against each other does it take to make love? Why does anyone ever make love?
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My life story is the story of everyone I’ve ever met.
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The French, who love their dogs, sometimes eat their horses. The Spanish, who love their horses, sometimes eat their cows. The Indians, who love their cows, sometimes eat their dogs.
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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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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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The only thing more painful than being an active forgetter is to be an inert rememberer.
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I love sushi, I love fried chicken, I love steak. But there is a limit to my love.
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Everything I did, I did because I thought it was the correct thing to do, I am not a hero, it is true, But I am not a bad person, either.
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I want an infinitely blank book and the rest of time.
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There are only some many times you can utter “It does not hurt” before it begins to hurt even more than the hurt.
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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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The world is a big place,” he said, “but so is the inside of an apartment!
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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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Memory was supposed to fill the time, but it made time a hole to be filled. Each second was two hundred yards, to be walked, crawled. You couldn’t see the next hour, it was so far in the distance. Tomorrow was over the horizon, and would take an entire day to reach.
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Being with him made my brain quiet. I didn’t have to invent a thing.
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She laughed enough to migrate an entire flock of birds. That was how she said yes.
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The mistakes I’ve made are dead to me. But I can’t take back the things I never did.
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In truth I was manufacturing a brick wall of shits.
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It broke my heart into more pieces than my heart was made of, why can’t people say what they mean at the time?
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She avoids mirrors, and lifts a powerful telescope to find herself.
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Part of living your life is an awareness of the opportunities that can be missed and an awareness that time moves in one direction.
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You do not have to utter anything you do not want to utter,” I told her, and she said, “Then I would never utter another word again.” “You do not have to do anything that you do not want to do.” “Then I would never do anything again.
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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.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER