Fiction works when it makes a reader feel something strongly.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERFood serves two parallel purposes: it nourishes and it helps you remember. Eating and storytelling are inseparable-the saltwater is also tears; the honey not only tastes sweet, but makes us think of sweetness; the matzo is the bread of our affliction.
More Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes
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Memory was supposed to fill the time, but it made time a hole to be filled. Each second was two hundred yards, to be walked, crawled. You couldn’t see the next hour, it was so far in the distance. Tomorrow was over the horizon, and would take an entire day to reach.
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You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.
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Every factory-farmed animal is, as a practice, treated in ways that would be illegal if it were a dog or a cat.
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We had everything to say to each other, but no ways to say it.
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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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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.
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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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Once you hear something, you can never return to the time before you heard it.
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I imagine a line, a white line, painted on the sand and on the ocean, from me to you.
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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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Being with him made my brain quiet. I didn’t have to invent a thing.
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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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Time was passing like a hand waving from a train that I wanted to be on.
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I looked at everyone and wondered where they came from, and who they missed, and what they were sorry for.
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Why are you leaving me? He wrote, I do not know how to live. I do not know either but I am trying. I do not know how to try. There were some 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