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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.

Jonathan Safran Foer

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 FOER

Food Help Honey Nourish Ourselves Purpose Remember Serve Tears
One hundred years of joy can be erased in one second.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Erase Happiness Oneself Pain
Only humans can cry tears.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Cry Human Tears
The philosopher Elaine Scarry has observed that “beauty always takes place in the particular.” Cruelty, on the other hand, prefers abstraction.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Cruelty Observation Philosophy Place
Please be truthful, but also please be benevolent, please.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Compassionate Truth
I’m so afraid of losing something I love that I refuse to love anything.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Afraid Lose Love Myself Refusal
So many people enter and leave your life! Hundreds of thousands of people! You have to keep the door open so they can come in! But it also means you have to let them go!
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Leaving Let Go Life People Yourself
Cruelty depends on an understanding of cruelty, and the ability to choose against it. Or to choose to ignore it.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Ability Choice Cruelty Ignorance Understand
Food 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 FOER

Family Food Herself Offering Terror Tree
Memory was supposed to fill the time, but it made time a hole to be filled. Each second was two hundred yards, to be walked, crawled. You couldn’t see the next hour, it was so far in the distance. Tomorrow was over the horizon, and would take an entire day to reach.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Day Distance Fill Memories Reach Time Walk Yourself
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

Existence heavy Myself Time Universe
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
If I’d been someone else in a different world I’d’ve done something different, but I was myself and the world was the world, so I was silent.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Different Myself Silence World
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
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

Animal Change Expose Live Respond Silence
This is my heart. You are touching it with your left hand. You are touching it with your left hand, not because you are left-handed, although you might be, but because I am holding it against my heart. What you are feeling is the beating of my heart. It is what keeps me alive.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Alive Feeling Hands Heart Touch Yourself

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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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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Popular Authors

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