I missed you even when I was with you. That’s been my problem. I miss what I already have, and I surround myself with things that are missing.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOEREvery 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.
More Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes
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It can be challenge enough to have to eat with myself.
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The meaning of my thoughts started to float away from me, like leaves that fall from a tree into a river, I was the tree, the world was the river.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
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?
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
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.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
It is not a thing that you can imagine. It only is. After that, there can be no imagining.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
I looked at everyone and wondered where they came from, and who they missed, and what they were sorry for.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
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?
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
There’s nothing wrong with not understanding yourself.
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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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In truth I was manufacturing a brick wall of shits.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
The animals are those things that God likes but doesn’t love.
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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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Silently the animal catches our glance. The animal looks at us, and whether we look away or not, we are exposed. Whether we change our lives or do nothing, we have responded. To do nothing is to do something.
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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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He couldn’t bear to live, but he couldn’t bear to die. He couldn’t bear the thought of he making love to someone else, but neither could he bear the absence of the thought. And as for the note, he couldn’t bear to keep it, but he couldn’t bear to destroy it either.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER