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.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERFeeding my children is not like feeding myself: it matters more.
More Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes
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I can only hold on to the things I want to lose.
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Every 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.
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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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I woke up once in the middle of the night, and Buckminster’s paws were on my eyelids. He must have been feeling my nightmares.
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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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Memory was supposed to fill the time, but it made time a hole to be filled.
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People with nothing to declare carry the most.
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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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You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.
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She had fallen in love so many times that she began to suspect she was not falling in love at all, but doing something much more ordinary.
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If we communicated with something like music, we would never be misunderstood, because there is nothing in music to understand.
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Choosing leaf or flesh, factory farm or family farm, does not in itself change the world, but teaching ourselves, our children, our local communities, and our nation to choose conscience over ease can.
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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
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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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It is not a thing that you can imagine. It only is. After that, there can be no imagining.
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Everything else happened – why not the things that could have?
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My life story is the story of everyone I’ve ever met.
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When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much.
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Not responding is a response–we are equally responsible for what we don’t do. In the case of animal slaughter, to throw your hands in the air is to wrap your fingers around a knife handle.
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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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The philosopher Elaine Scarry has observed that “beauty always takes place in the particular.” Cruelty, on the other hand, prefers abstraction.
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Time was passing like a hand waving from a train that I wanted to be on.
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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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We could imagine all sorts of universes unlike this one, but this is the one that happened.
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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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Everything I did, I did because I thought it was the correct thing to do, I am not a hero, it is true, But I am not a bad person, either.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER