Food for her is not food, it is terror, dignity, gratitude, vengeance, joyfulness, humiliation, religion, history, and, of course, love. As if the fruit she always offered us were picked from the destroyed brances of out family tree.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERThe 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.
More Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes
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I want an infinitely blank book and the rest of 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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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 the tragedy of loving, you can’t love anything more than something you miss.
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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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Being with him made my brain quiet. I didn’t have to invent a thing.
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I was more alone than if I had been alone.
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With writing, we have second chances.
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Love me, because love doesn’t exist, and I have tried everything that does.
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What does it remember like?
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The hardest part of writing is not to get the ideas but to remember, why it is important to get them.
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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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The animals are those things that God likes but doesn’t love.
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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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I don’t think that there are any limits to how excellent we could make life seem.
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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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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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Feathers filled the small room. Our laughter kept the feathers in the air. I thought about birds. Could they fly is there wasn’t someone, somewhere, laughing?
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I didn’t feel empty. I wished I’d felt empty. … I wanted to be empty like an overturned pitcher. But I was full like a stone.
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She avoids mirrors, and lifts a powerful telescope to find herself.
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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.
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She was a genius of sadness, immersing herself in it, separating its numerous strands, appreciating its subtle nuances. She was a prism through which sadness could be divided into its infinite spectrum.
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Shyness is when you turn your head away from something you want.
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There’s nothing wrong with not understanding yourself.
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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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I 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.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER