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.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERWe could imagine all sorts of universes unlike this one, but this is the one that happened.
More Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes
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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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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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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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I could not believe in a God that would challenge faith like this.
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It 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.
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I want an infinitely blank book and the rest of time.
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He couldn’t bear to live, but he couldn’t bear to die. He couldn’t bear the thought of he making love to someone else, but neither could he bear the absence of the thought. And as for the note, he couldn’t bear to keep it, but he couldn’t bear to destroy it either.
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We spent our lives making livings.
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It was not the feeling of completeness I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty.
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If the thrill of hunting were in the hunt, or even in the marksmanship, a camera would do just as well.
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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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Why does watching a dog be a dog fill one with happiness?
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It’s the tragedy of loving, you can’t love anything more than something you miss.
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When I looked at you, my life made sense. Even the bad things made sense. They were necessary to make you possible.
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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.
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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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I can forgive you for leaving, but not for coming back.
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She said, “Do you have more things that you need, or more that you don’t need?” I said, “It depends on what it means to need.
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Most of the times that I think about my relationship to Judaism, I not only accuse myself of a shallowness, but I feel certain that there’s a shallowness there. That’s not a bad thing, really.
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The more you love someone, he came to think, the harder it is to tell them. It surprised him that strangers didn’t stop each other on the street to say I love you.
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If I’d been someone else in a different world I’d’ve done something different, but I was myself and the world was the world, so I was silent.
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I wasn’t having second thoughts, but I was having thoughts.
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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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No matter how much I feel, I’m not going to let it out. If I have to cry, I’m gonna cry on the inside. If I have to bleed, I’ll bruise. If my heart starts going crazy, I’m not gonna tell everyone in the world about it. It doesn’t help anything. It just makes everyone’s life worse.
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Every moment before this one depends on this one.
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She extended a hand that I didn’t know how to take, so I broke its fingers with my silence.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER