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 FOERFood 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.
More Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes
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The animals are those things that God likes but doesn’t love.
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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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Only humans can cry tears.
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I wish my days could be washed away like the chalk lines of my days.
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One day you will do things for me that you hate. That is what it means to be family.
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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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A few weeks after the worst day, I started writing lots of letters. I don’t know why, but it was one of the only things that made my boots lighter.
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Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?
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Feeding my children is not like feeding myself: it matters more.
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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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I don’t think that there are any limits to how excellent we could make life seem.
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So many people enter and leave your life! Hundreds of thousands of people! You have to keep the door open so they can come in! But it also means you have to let them go!
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Not responding is a response – we are equally responsible for what we don’t do.
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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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Worthy would-be worlds of words, whorls of working wonder.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER






