Cruelty depends on an understanding of cruelty, and the ability to choose against it. Or to choose to ignore it.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERSo many people enter and leave your life! Hundreds of thousands of people! You have to keep the door open so they can come in! But it also means you have to let them go!
More Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes
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There were 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 could imagine all sorts of universes unlike this one, but this is the one that happened.
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I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live.
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We burned with love for ourselves, all of us, starters of the fire we suffered- our love was the affliction for which only our love was the cure.
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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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The philosopher Elaine Scarry has observed that “beauty always takes place in the particular.” Cruelty, on the other hand, prefers abstraction.
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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 made me start to wonder if there were other people so lonely so close. I thought about “Eleanor Rigby.” It’s true, where do they all come from? And where do they all belong?
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Shyness is when you turn your head away from something you want.
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I’d rather somebody hate what I do than be indifferent to it.
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I wasn’t trying to invent better and better homes, but to show her that homes didn’t matter, we could live in any home, in any city, in any country, in any century, and be happy, as if the world were just what we lived in.
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So many people enter and leave your life! Hundreds of thousands of people! You have to keep the door open so they can come in! But it also means you have to let them go!
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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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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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Sometimes you have to put your fears in order.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER