The mistakes I’ve made are dead to me. But I can’t take back the things I never did.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERThere’s nothing wrong with not understanding yourself.
More Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes
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She wanted more, more slang, more figures of speech, the bee’s knees, the cats pajamas, horse of a different color, dog-tired, she wanted to talk like she was born here, like she never came from anywhere else
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I’m so afraid of losing something I love that I refuse to love anything.
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If the thrill of hunting were in the hunt, or even in the marksmanship, a camera would do just as well.
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I want an infinitely blank book and the rest of time.
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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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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.
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Worthy would-be worlds of words, whorls of working wonder.
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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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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 never confused what I had with what I was.
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I love sushi, I love fried chicken, I love steak. But there is a limit to my love.
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Fiction works when it makes a reader feel something strongly.
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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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Do you eat chicken because you are familiar with the scientific literature on them and have decided that their suffering doesn’t matter, or do you do it because it tastes good?
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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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Being with him made my brain quiet. I didn’t have to invent a thing.
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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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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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We believed in our grandmother’s cooking more fervently than we believed in God.
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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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We spent our lives making livings.
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Isn’t it strange how upset people get about a few dozen baseball players taking growth hormones, when we’re doing what we’re doing to our food animals and feeding them to our children?
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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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I could not believe in a God that would challenge faith like this.
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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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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.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER