There are only some many times you can utter “It does not hurt” before it begins to hurt even more than the hurt.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERWe are not long-term beings. Not heroes of romances in many volumes. For one gesture, for one word alone, we shall make the effort. We openly admit: our creations will be temporary. We shall have this as our aim: a gesture.
More Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes
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This 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?
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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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It’s the tragedy of loving, you can’t love anything more than something you miss.
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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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The bruises go away, and so does how you hate, and so does the feeling that everything you receive from life is something you have earned.
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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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We live in a world made up more of story than stuff. We are creatures of memory more than reminders, of love more than likes.
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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?
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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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You can call your turkey organic and torture it daily.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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I thought for a minute, and then I got heavy, heavy boots.
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When I looked at you, my life made sense. Even the bad things made sense. They were necessary to make you possible.
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There were things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him. So I buried them, and let them hurt me.
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Let love write on you for awhile.
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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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Sometimes people who seem good end up being not as good as you might have hoped, you know?
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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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Shyness is when you turn your head away from something you want.
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Feeding my children is not like feeding myself: it matters more.
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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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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 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.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER