Cruelty depends on an understanding of cruelty, and the ability to choose against it. Or to choose to ignore it.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERWe spent our lives making livings.
More Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes
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Being with him made my brain quiet. I didn’t have to invent a thing.
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Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?
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You are the only one who has understood even a whisper of me, and I will tell you that I am the only person who has understood even a whisper of you.
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I never confused what I had with what I was.
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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.
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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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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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There were 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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I do think ordinariness is, in a way, the enemy, but not ordinariness as the opposite of flamboyance.
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Words are capable of making experience more vivid, and also of organizing it. They can scare us, and they can comfort us.
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It is not a thing that you can imagine. It only is. After that, there can be no imagining.
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Memory was supposed to fill the time, but it made time a hole to be filled. Each second was two hundred yards, to be walked, crawled. You couldn’t see the next hour, it was so far in the distance. Tomorrow was over the horizon, and would take an entire day to reach.
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There are still many different ways to get stuck, existentially stuck. Feeling like, “This is worthless. I’m wasting my time, and I would be wasting the time of someone who tried to read this.” It happens all the time.
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Every night before putting her to sleep, Yankel counts her ribs, as if one might have disappeared in the course of the day and become the seed and soil for some new companion to steal her away from him.
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She wanted more, more slang, more figures of speech, the bee’s knees, the cats pajamas, horse of a different color, dog-tired, she wanted to talk like she was born here, like she never came from anywhere else
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER