Just to be a functioning adult in the world, we develop all of these layers of protection. When we see homeless people, we don’t cry, even though homeless people probably deserve our tears – you know, it’s a horrible thing.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOEROnce you hear something, you can never return to the time before you heard it.
More Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes
-
-
I can only hold on to the things I want to lose.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
She avoids mirrors, and lifts a powerful telescope to find herself.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
Silently the animal catches our glance. The animal looks at us, and whether we look away or not, we are exposed. Whether we change our lives or do nothing, we have responded. To do nothing is to do something.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
One of the greatest opportunities to live our values-or betray them-lies in the food we put on our plates.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
I looked at everyone and wondered where they came from, and who they missed, and what they were sorry for.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
And she would say, “Today you believe in God?” And he would say, “Today I believe in love”.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
You are the only one who has understood even a whisper of me, and I will tell you that I am the only person who has understood even a whisper of you.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
I got incredibly heavy boots about how relatively insignificant life is, and how, compared to the universe and compared to time, it didn’t even matter if I existed at all.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
The philosopher Elaine Scarry has observed that “beauty always takes place in the particular.” Cruelty, on the other hand, prefers abstraction.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
Feathers filled the small room. Our laughter kept the feathers in the air. I thought about birds. Could they fly is there wasn’t someone, somewhere, laughing?
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
She was with me. She did all of those things and so many more, things I would never tell anyone, and she never even loved me. Now that’s love.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
We had everything to say to each other, but no ways to say it.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
I want an infinitely blank book and the rest of time.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
Worthy would-be worlds of words, whorls of working wonder.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER