Highs and lows make you feel that things matter, but they’re nothing.” “So what’s something?” “Being reliable is something. Being good.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERMy 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.
More Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes
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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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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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There’s nothing wrong with not understanding yourself.
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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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We spent our lives making livings.
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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?
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I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live.
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Worthy would-be worlds of words, whorls of working wonder.
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Everything is to protect you. I exist in case you need to be protected.
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Writers now are putting total faith in designers at Apple and Amazon. It’s almost like a race-car driver having no input into how cars are designed.
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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.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
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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Songs are as sad as the listener.
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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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Only humans can cry tears.
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Just to be a functioning adult in the world, we develop all of these layers of protection. When we see homeless people, we don’t cry, even though homeless people probably deserve our tears – you know, it’s a horrible thing.
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She let out a laugh, and then she put her hand over her mouth, like she was angry at herself for forgetting her sadness.
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.
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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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In my family, Father is the world champion at ending conversations.
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Time was passing like a hand waving from a train that I wanted to be on.
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I put my hand on the doorknob because I thought maybe her hand was on the doorknob on the other side.
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Whether we change our lives or do nothing, we have responded. To do nothing is to do something.
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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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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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We often use technology to save time, but increasingly, it either takes the saved time along with it, or makes the saved time less present, intimate and rich. I worry that the closer the world gets to our fingertips, the further it gets from our hearts.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER