If we communicated with something like music, we would never be misunderstood, because there is nothing in music to understand.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERWhy does watching a dog be a dog fill one with happiness?
More Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes
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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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Cruelty depends on an understanding of cruelty, and the ability to choose against it. Or to choose to ignore it.
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While it is always possible to wake a person who’s sleeping, no amount of noise will wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.
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I can only hold on to the things I want to lose.
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We often use technology to save time, but increasingly, it either takes the saved time along with it, or makes the saved time less present, intimate and rich. I worry that the closer the world gets to our fingertips, the further it gets from our hearts.
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Am I such a bad person for dreaming of a world that ends when I do? I don’t mean the world ending with respect to me, but every set of eyes closing with mine.
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There’s nothing wrong with not understanding yourself.
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I think and think and think, I‘ve thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.
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Ironically, the utterly unselective omnivore — “I’m easy; I’ll eat anything” — can appear more socially sensitive than the individual who tries to eat in a way that is good for society.
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This is my heart. You are touching it with your left hand. You are touching it with your left hand, not because you are left-handed, although you might be, but because I am holding it against my heart. What you are feeling is the beating of my heart. It is what keeps me alive.
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We talked about nothing in particular, but it felt like we were talking about the most important things.
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The animals are those things that God likes but doesn’t love.
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We are not long-term beings. Not heroes of romances in many volumes. For one gesture, for one word alone, we shall make the effort. We openly admit: our creations will be temporary. We shall have this as our aim: a gesture.
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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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We aren’t exactly emptying the oceans; it’s more like clear-cutting a forest with thousands of species to create massive fields with one type of soybean.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER