One hundred years of joy can be erased in one second.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERThe only thing more painful than being an active forgetter is to be an inert rememberer.
More Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes
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I imagine a line, a white line, painted on the sand and on the ocean, from me to you.
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I thought for a minute, and then I got heavy, heavy boots.
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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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Being with him made my brain quiet. I didn’t have to invent a thing.
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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
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The mistakes I’ve made are dead to me. But I can’t take back the things I never did.
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I took the world into me, rearranged it, and sent it back out as a question: “Do you like me?
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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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You do not have to utter anything you do not want to utter,” I told her, and she said, “Then I would never utter another word again.” “You do not have to do anything that you do not want to do.” “Then I would never do anything again.
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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 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.
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As long as I am thinking, I am alive.
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Why does watching a dog be a dog fill one with happiness?
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Every night before putting her to sleep, Yankel counts her ribs, as if one might have disappeared in the course of the day and become the seed and soil for some new companion to steal her away from him.
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Words are capable of making experience more vivid, and also of organizing it. They can scare us, and they can comfort us.
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I do think ordinariness is, in a way, the enemy, but not ordinariness as the opposite of flamboyance.
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We believed in our grandmother’s cooking more fervently than we believed in God.
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The more you love someone, he came to think, the harder it is to tell them. It surprised him that strangers didn’t stop each other on the street to say I love you.
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The more exposure people have to the realities of factory farming, the more we will see people rejecting it. It’s already happening.
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We live in a world made up more of story than stuff. We are creatures of memory more than reminders, of love more than likes.
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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.
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You are the only one who has understood even a whisper of me, and I will tell you that I am the only person who has understood even a whisper of you.
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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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I was more alone than if I had been alone.
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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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The only thing more painful than being an active forgetter is to be an inert rememberer.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER