In my family, Father is the world champion at ending conversations.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERNo 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.
More Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes
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Ninety-nine percent of all land animals eaten or used to produce milk and eggs in the United States are factory farmed. So although there are important exceptions, to speak about eating animals today is to speak about factory farming.
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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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She said, “Do you have more things that you need, or more that you don’t need?” I said, “It depends on what it means to need.
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I shook my tambourine the whole time, because it helped me remember that even though I was going through different neighborhoods, I was still me.
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Of course food has an important cultural use in families, but there are things that have more important cultural uses in families, and broadening the conversation out simply from what’s reasonable also allows in other things.
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Choosing leaf or flesh, factory farm or family farm, does not in itself change the world, but teaching ourselves, our children, our local communities, and our nation to choose conscience over ease can.
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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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Time was passing like a hand waving from a train that I wanted to be on.
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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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Songs are as sad as the listener.
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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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It’s hard to say goodbye to the place you’ve lived. It can be as hard as saying goodbye to a person.
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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.
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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.
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Part of living your life is an awareness of the opportunities that can be missed and an awareness that time moves in one direction.
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