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The bruises go away, and so does how you hate, and so does the feeling that everything you receive from life is something you have earned.

Jonathan Safran Foer

He promised us that everything would be okay. I was a child, but I knew that everything would not be okay. That did not make my father a liar. It made him my father.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Children Deep Family Father Lying Myself Parents Promise
My wife and I have chosen to bring up our children as vegetarians. In another time or place, we might have made a different decision. But the realities of our present moment compelled us to make that choice.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Children Choice Decision Different Moments Place Present Reality Wife
The animals are those things that God likes but doesn’t love.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Animal God Love
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

Laughter Myself Room Small
When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Eat Factory Live Ourselves
The philosopher Elaine Scarry has observed that “beauty always takes place in the particular.” Cruelty, on the other hand, prefers abstraction.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Cruelty Observation Philosophy Place
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.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Food Help Honey Nourish Ourselves Purpose Remember Serve Tears
What does it remember like?
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

One Liner Remember
I was more alone than if I had been alone.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Alone Myself
Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Bone Hear Live Myself Time Weight
But come. No explaining or mending. Be beside me somewhere.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Come Explanation Mend Myself
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

Hard Live Person Place Travel
When I looked at you, my life made sense. Even the bad things made sense. They were necessary to make you possible.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Life Love Necessary Possible Yourself
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.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Deep Myself Need Philosophy
It is not a thing that you can imagine. It only is. After that, there can be no imagining.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Imagination Thinking Yourself
Fiction works when it makes a reader feel something strongly.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Feeling Fiction Reading Strong Work

The bruises go away, and so does how you hate, and so does the feeling that everything you receive from life is something you have earned.

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The bruises go away, and so does how you hate, and so does the feeling that everything you receive from life is something you have earned.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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