Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERPeople with nothing to declare carry the most.
More Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes
-
-
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.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
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?
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
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.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
Words are capable of making experience more vivid, and also of organizing it. They can scare us, and they can comfort us.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
Why are you leaving me? He wrote, I do not know how to live. I do not know either but I am trying. I do not know how to try. There were some things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him. So i buried them and let them hurt me
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
We shared the smile of recognizing ourselves in each other, how many imposters do I have? Do we all make the same mistakes, or has one of us gotten it right, or even just a bit less wrong, am I the imposter?
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
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 FOER -
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.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
Every factory-farmed animal is, as a practice, treated in ways that would be illegal if it were a dog or a cat.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
Whether we change our lives or do nothing, we have responded. To do nothing is to do something.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
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.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
While it is always possible to wake a person who’s sleeping, no amount of noise will wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
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.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
I put my hand on the doorknob because I thought maybe her hand was on the doorknob on the other side.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
It can be challenge enough to have to eat with myself.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
I wasn’t having second thoughts, but I was having thoughts.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
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 FOER -
Not responding is a response – we are equally responsible for what we don’t do.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
Thanksgiving is the holiday that encompasses all others. All of them, from Martin Luther King Day to Arbor Day to Christmas to Valentine’s Day, are in one way or another about being thankful.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
The animals are those things that God likes but doesn’t love.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
Please be truthful, but also please be benevolent, please.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
It was one of the best days of my life, a day during which I lived my life and didn’t think about my life at all.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
Why does watching a dog be a dog fill one with happiness?
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
I have no need for the past, I thought, like a child. I did not consider that the past might have a need for me.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
It is not a thing that you can imagine. It only is. After that, there can be no imagining.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
Tomorrow was over the horizon, and would take an entire day to reach.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER