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The French, who love their dogs, sometimes eat their horses. The Spanish, who love their horses, sometimes eat their cows. The Indians, who love their cows, sometimes eat their dogs.

Jonathan Safran Foer

Time was passing like a hand waving from a train that I wanted to be on.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Hand Myself Time Training
The only thing more painful than being an active forgetter is to be an inert rememberer.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Active Forget Pain Remember
The animals are those things that God likes but doesn’t love.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Animal God Love
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

Death Destroy Himself Live Note
I took the world into me, rearranged it, and sent it back out as a question: “Do you like me?
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Arrangement Myself Question World
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

Empty Feeling Myself Stone
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

Leave Meaning Myself River Start Thinking Tree
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.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Breathe Father Process Tree Understand Young
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

Bury Communication Hide Himself Hurt Myself Word
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.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Art Drive Love Myself Politics Purpose
When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Eat Factory Live Ourselves
Feeding my children is not like feeding myself: it matters more.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Children Feed Myself Worth
It is not a thing that you can imagine. It only is. After that, there can be no imagining.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Imagination Thinking Yourself
I felt shame for living in a nation of unprecedented prosperity-a nation that spends a smaller percentage of income on food than any other civilization has in human history-but in the name of affordability treats the animals it eats with cruelty so extreme it would be illegal if inflicted on a dog.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Animal Civilization Dog Feeling Illegal Name Nation Prosperity Shame Treat
I looked at everyone and wondered where they came from, and who they missed, and what they were sorry for.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Missing Myself Sorry Wonder
There are still many different ways to get stuck, existentially stuck. Feeling like, “This is worthless. I’m wasting my time, and I would be wasting the time of someone who tried to read this.” It happens all the time.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Different Myself Reading Wasted Time Way Worth
Of course food has an important cultural use in families, but there are things that have more important cultural uses in families, and broadening the conversation out simply from what’s reasonable also allows in other things.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Allow Conversation Culture Family Food Important Reason Simplicity
She extended a hand that I didn’t know how to take, so I broke its fingers with my silence.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Break Fingers Hands Herself Silence
Ninety-nine percent of all land animals eaten or used to produce milk and eggs in the United States are factory farmed. So although there are important exceptions, to speak about eating animals today is to speak about factory farming.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Animal Eat Factory Farm Land Talk
The hardest part of writing is not to get the ideas but to remember, why it is important to get them.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Hard Ideas Important Remember Writing
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 FOER

Beginning Hurt Time Yourself
But come. No explaining or mending. Be beside me somewhere.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Come Explanation Mend Myself
My point is that there are a lot of forces, like the media and the general political rhetoric tells us we should have more. That we should do better than our parents and have a bigger house or a better car.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Better Car Force Home Media Parents Point Politics
Every factory-farmed animal is, as a practice, treated in ways that would be illegal if it were a dog or a cat.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Animal Cat Dog Farm Illegal Practice Treat Way
Everything else happened – why not the things that could have?
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Destiny Fate Life
I shook my tambourine the whole time, because it helped me remember that even though I was going through different neighborhoods, I was still me.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Different Help Myself Remember Time
I have no need for the past, I thought, like a child. I did not consider that the past might have a need for me.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Children Myself Need Past

The French, who love their dogs, sometimes eat their horses. The Spanish, who love their horses, sometimes eat their cows. The Indians, who love their cows, sometimes eat their dogs.

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The French, who love their dogs, sometimes eat their horses. The Spanish, who love their horses, sometimes eat their cows. The Indians, who love their cows, sometimes eat their dogs.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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