Am I such a bad person for dreaming of a world that ends when I do? I don’t mean the world ending with respect to me, but every set of eyes closing with mine.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERI watched the sheets breathe when she breathed, like how Dad used to say that trees inhale when people exhale, because I was too young to understand the truth about biological processes.
More Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes
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I’d rather somebody hate what I do than be indifferent to it.
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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 -
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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But 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.
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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.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
Memory was supposed to fill the time, but it made time a hole to be filled.
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Ironically, the utterly unselective omnivore — “I’m easy; I’ll eat anything” — can appear more socially sensitive than the individual who tries to eat in a way that is good for society.
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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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It was not the feeling of completeness I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty.
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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?
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Not responding is a response – we are equally responsible for what we don’t do.
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I 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.
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I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love.
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Feeding my children is not like feeding myself: it matters more.
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I’m so afraid of losing something I love that I refuse to love anything.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER