This is my heart. You are touching it with your left hand. You are touching it with your left hand, not because you are left-handed, although you might be, but because I am holding it against my heart. What you are feeling is the beating of my heart. It is what keeps me alive.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERThere 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.
More Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes
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You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.
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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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The 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.
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We had everything to say to each other, but no ways to say it.
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Isn’t it strange how upset people get about a few dozen baseball players taking growth hormones, when we’re doing what we’re doing to our food animals and feeding them to our children?
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I got incredibly heavy boots about how relatively insignificant life is, and how, compared to the universe and compared to time, it didn’t even matter if I existed at all.
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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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Sadness of not knowing enough words to [express what you mean].
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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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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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Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.
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My wife and I have chosen to bring up our children as vegetarians. In another time or place, we might have made a different decision. But the realities of our present moment compelled us to make that choice.
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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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She was with me. She did all of those things and so many more, things I would never tell anyone, and she never even loved me. Now that’s love.
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I dreamt four nights ago of clock hands descending from the universe like rain, of the moon as a green eye, of mirrors and insects, of a love that never withdrew. It was not the feeling of completeness that I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER