It was not the feeling of completeness I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERIt’s hard to say goodbye to the place you’ve lived. It can be as hard as saying goodbye to a person.
More Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes
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Sadness of not knowing enough words to [express what you mean].
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Highs and lows make you feel that things matter, but they’re nothing.” “So what’s something?” “Being reliable is something. Being good.
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In the morning, when the nothing vase casts a something shadow, like the memory of someone you’ve lost, what can you say about that?
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Every factory-farmed animal is, as a practice, treated in ways that would be illegal if it were a dog or a cat.
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I didn’t feel empty. I wished I’d felt empty. … I wanted to be empty like an overturned pitcher. But I was full like a stone.
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I put my hand on the doorknob because I thought maybe her hand was on the doorknob on the other side.
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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.
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Why does watching a dog be a dog fill one with happiness?
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She extended a hand that I didn’t know how to take, so I broke its fingers with my silence.
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I thought for a minute, and then I got heavy, heavy boots.
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Once you hear something, you can never return to the time before you heard it.
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I dreamt four nights ago of clock hands descending from the universe like rain, of the moon as a green eye, of mirrors and insects, of a love that never withdrew. It was not the feeling of completeness that I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty.
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My life story is the story of everyone I’ve ever met.
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Do you eat chicken because you are familiar with the scientific literature on them and have decided that their suffering doesn’t matter, or do you do it because it tastes good?
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I tried the key in all the doors, even though he said he didn’t recognize it. It’s not that I didn’t trust him, becuase I did. It’s that at the end of my search I wanted to be able to say: I don’t know how I could have tried harder.
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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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Art can be very political but that can’t be the purpose of art, it can’t be the driving force. It isn’t with any of the books that I love, anyway.
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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.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
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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If the thrill of hunting were in the hunt, or even in the marksmanship, a camera would do just as well.
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Thanksgiving is the holiday that encompasses all others. All of them, from Martin Luther King Day to Arbor Day to Christmas to Valentine’s Day, are in one way or another about being thankful.
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The meaning of my thoughts started to float away from me, like leaves that fall from a tree into a river, I was the tree, the world was the river.
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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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Fiction works when it makes a reader feel something strongly.
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She was a genius of sadness, immersing herself in it, separating its numerous strands, appreciating its subtle nuances. She was a prism through which sadness could be divided into its infinite spectrum.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER