Part of living your life is an awareness of the opportunities that can be missed and an awareness that time moves in one direction.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERJust 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.
More Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes
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Sometimes I imagined stitching all of our little touches together. How many hundreds of thousands of fingers brushing against each other does it take to make love? Why does anyone ever make love?
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Memory was supposed to fill the time, but it made time a hole to be filled.
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He was someone whom everyone admired and liked but whom nobody knew. He was like a book that you could feel good holding, that you could talk about without ever having read, that you could recommend.
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She was with me. She did all of those things and so many more, things I would never tell anyone, and she never even loved me. Now that’s love.
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Sometimes you have to put your fears in order.
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It has shown me that everything is illuminated in the light of the past. It is always along the side of us…on the inside, looking out.
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I felt suddenly shy. I was not used to shy. I was used to shame. Shyness is when you turn your head away from something you want. Shame is when you turn your head away from something you do not want.
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I tried the key in all the doors, even though he said he didn’t recognize it. It’s not that I didn’t trust him, becuase I did. It’s that at the end of my search I wanted to be able to say: I don’t know how I could have tried harder.
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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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We spent our lives making livings.
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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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Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.
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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 talked about nothing in particular, but it felt like we were talking about the most important things.
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The world is a big place,” he said, “but so is the inside of an apartment!
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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.
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One hundred years of joy can be erased in one second.
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Only humans can cry tears.
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I’m sorry for my inability to let unimportant things go, for my inability to hold on to the important things.
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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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I watched the sheets breathe when she breathed, like how Dad used to say that trees inhale when people exhale, because I was too young to understand the truth about biological processes.
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As long as I am thinking, I am alive.
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In the morning, when the nothing vase casts a something shadow, like the memory of someone you’ve lost, what can you say about that?
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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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I thought for a minute, and then I got heavy, heavy boots.
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With writing, we have second chances.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER