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.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERYou cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.
More Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes
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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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I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live.
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He promised us that everything would be okay. I was a child, but I knew that everything would not be okay. That did not make my father a liar. It made him my father.
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Only humans can cry tears.
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I shook my tambourine the whole time, because it helped me remember that even though I was going through different neighborhoods, I was still me.
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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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A few weeks after the worst day, I started writing lots of letters. I don’t know why, but it was one of the only things that made my boots lighter.
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I am sure people tell you this constantly but if you looked up ‘incredibly beautiful’ in the dictionary there would be a picture of you.
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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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I felt, that night, on that stage, under that skull, incredibly close to everything in the universe, but also extremely alone.
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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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We believed in our grandmother’s cooking more fervently than we believed in God.
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One of the greatest opportunities to live our values-or betray them-lies in the food we put on our plates.
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I’m so afraid of losing something I love that I refuse to love anything.
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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.
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Art can be very political but that can’t be the purpose of art, it can’t be the driving force. It isn’t with any of the books that I love, anyway.
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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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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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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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She had fallen in love so many times that she began to suspect she was not falling in love at all, but doing something much more ordinary.
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Why does watching a dog be a dog fill one with happiness?
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If I’d been someone else in a different world I’d’ve done something different, but I was myself and the world was the world, so I was silent.
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I didn’t feel empty. I wished I’d felt empty. … I wanted to be empty like an overturned pitcher. But I was full like a stone.
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I was more alone than if I had been alone.
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We had everything to say to each other, but no ways to say it.
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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.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER