Food 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.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERI don’t think that there are any limits to how excellent we could make life seem.
More Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes
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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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Part of living your life is an awareness of the opportunities that can be missed and an awareness that time moves in one direction.
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While it is always possible to wake a person who’s sleeping, no amount of noise will wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.
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In my family, Father is the world champion at ending conversations.
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Everything is to protect you. I exist in case you need to be protected.
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Worthy would-be worlds of words, whorls of working wonder.
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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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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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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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Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?
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Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.
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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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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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Let love write on you for awhile.
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I 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