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 FOERThis is love, she thought, isn’t it? When you notice someone’s absence and hate that absence more than anything? More, even, than you love his presence?
More Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes
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Sometimes people who seem good end up being not as good as you might have hoped, you know?
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
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.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
I try not to remember the life that I didn’t want to lose but lost and have to remember,
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
I can only hold on to the things I want to lose.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
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.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
There were things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him. So I buried them, and let them hurt me.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
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.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
And she would say, “Today you believe in God?” And he would say, “Today I believe in love”.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
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 -
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 FOER -
I got incredibly heavy boots about how relatively insignificant life is, and how, compared to the universe and compared to time, it didn’t even matter if I existed at all.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
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
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
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.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
I want an infinitely blank book and the rest of time.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
I was of the opinion that the past is past, and like all that is not now it should remain buried along the side of our memories.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER