Please be truthful, but also please be benevolent, please.
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
-
-
Fiction works when it makes a reader feel something strongly.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
Why didn’t I learn to treat everything like it was the last time. My greatest regret was how much I believed in the future.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
I never confused what I had with what I was.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
I wasn’t having second thoughts, but I was having thoughts.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
I have so much to say to you. I want to begin at the beginning, because that is what you deserve. I want to tell you everything, without leaving out a single detail. But where is the beginning? And what is everything?
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
Words are capable of making experience more vivid, and also of organizing it. They can scare us, and they can comfort us.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
She let out a laugh, and then she put her hand over her mouth, like she was angry at herself for forgetting her sadness.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
You do not have to utter anything you do not want to utter,” I told her, and she said, “Then I would never utter another word again.” “You do not have to do anything that you do not want to do.” “Then I would never do anything again.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
It has shown me that everything is illuminated in the light of the past. It is always along the side of us…on the inside, looking out.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
No matter how much I feel, I’m not going to let it out. If I have to cry, I’m gonna cry on the inside. If I have to bleed, I’ll bruise. If my heart starts going crazy, I’m not gonna tell everyone in the world about it. It doesn’t help anything. It just makes everyone’s life worse.
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 -
It is not a thing that you can imagine. It only is. After that, there can be no imagining.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
Words never mean what we want them to mean.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
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 -
Everything else happened – why not the things that could have?
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER