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.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERWords are capable of making experience more vivid, and also of organizing it. They can scare us, and they can comfort us.
More Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes
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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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She was a genius of sadness, immersing herself in it, separating its numerous strands, appreciating its subtle nuances. She was a prism through which sadness could be divided into its infinite spectrum.
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Highs and lows make you feel that things matter, but they’re nothing.” “So what’s something?” “Being reliable is something. Being good.
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If we communicated with something like music, we would never be misunderstood, because there is nothing in music to understand.
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Ninety-nine percent of all land animals eaten or used to produce milk and eggs in the United States are factory farmed. So although there are important exceptions, to speak about eating animals today is to speak about factory farming.
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Time was passing like a hand waving from a train that I wanted to be on.
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Memory was supposed to fill the time, but it made time a hole to be filled.
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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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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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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.
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And she would say, “Today you believe in God?” And he would say, “Today I believe in love”.
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Not responding is a response–we are equally responsible for what we don’t do. In the case of animal slaughter, to throw your hands in the air is to wrap your fingers around a knife handle.
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You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.
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The animals are those things that God likes but doesn’t love.
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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.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER