Whether we change our lives or do nothing, we have responded. To do nothing is to do something.
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 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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I wasn’t having second thoughts, but I was having thoughts.
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I never confused what I had with what I was.
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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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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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Sadness of not knowing enough words to [express what you mean].
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Songs are as sad as the listener.
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She laughed enough to migrate an entire flock of birds. That was how she said yes.
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There are only some many times you can utter “It does not hurt” before it begins to hurt even more than the hurt.
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Sometimes I imagined stitching all of our little touches together. How many hundreds of thousands of fingers brushing against each other does it take to make love? Why does anyone ever make love?
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I felt suddenly shy. I was not used to shy. I was used to shame. Shyness is when you turn your head away from something you want. Shame is when you turn your head away from something you do not want.
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The world is a big place,” he said, “but so is the inside of an apartment!
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As long as I am thinking, I am alive.
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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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We often use technology to save time, but increasingly, it either takes the saved time along with it, or makes the saved time less present, intimate and rich. I worry that the closer the world gets to our fingertips, the further it gets from our hearts.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
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.
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And she would say, “Today you believe in God?” And he would say, “Today I believe in love”.
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People with nothing to declare carry the most.
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It was one of the best days of my life, a day during which I lived my life and didn’t think about my life at all.
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When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own.
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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.
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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.
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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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Please be truthful, but also please be benevolent, please.
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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.
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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?
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER