We spent our lives making livings.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERWe spent our lives making livings.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERThe more you love someone, he came to think, the harder it is to tell them. It surprised him that strangers didn’t stop each other on the street to say I love you.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERBut I believe that things are extremely complicated, and her looking over me was as complicated as anything could ever be. But it was also incredibly simple.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERThanksgiving is the holiday that encompasses all others. All of them, from Martin Luther King Day to Arbor Day to Christmas to Valentine’s Day, are in one way or another about being thankful.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERLove me, because love doesn’t exist, and I have tried everything that does.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERI want an infinitely blank book and the rest of time.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERIt 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.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERHe promised us that everything would be okay. I was a child, but I knew that everything would not be okay. That did not make my father a liar. It made him my father.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERWhy does watching a dog be a dog fill one with happiness?
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERShe extended a hand that I didn’t know how to take, so I broke its fingers with my silence.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERThe world is a big place,” he said, “but so is the inside of an apartment!
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERI 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 FOERFood 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 FOERThere 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 FOEREvery 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 FOERI dreamt four nights ago of clock hands descending from the universe like rain, of the moon as a green eye, of mirrors and insects, of a love that never withdrew. It was not the feeling of completeness that I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER