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 FOEREverything else happened – why not the things that could have?
More Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes
-
-
Everything I did, I did because I thought it was the correct thing to do, I am not a hero, it is true, But I am not a bad person, either.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
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.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
Please be truthful, but also please be benevolent, please.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
It made me start to wonder if there were other people so lonely so close. I thought about “Eleanor Rigby.” It’s true, where do they all come from? And where do they all belong?
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
She let out a laugh, and then she put her hand over her mouth, like she was angry at herself for forgetting her sadness.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
He couldn’t bear to live, but he couldn’t bear to die. He couldn’t bear the thought of he making love to someone else, but neither could he bear the absence of the thought. And as for the note, he couldn’t bear to keep it, but he couldn’t bear to destroy it either.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
Why does watching a dog be a dog fill one with happiness?
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
One hundred years of joy can be erased in one second.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
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 -
One of the greatest opportunities to live our values-or betray them-lies in the food we put on our plates.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
Of course food has an important cultural use in families, but there are things that have more important cultural uses in families, and broadening the conversation out simply from what’s reasonable also allows in other things.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
I love sushi, I love fried chicken, I love steak. But there is a limit to my love.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
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 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.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
Words are capable of making experience more vivid, and also of organizing it. They can scare us, and they can comfort us.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
Also, I designed a pretty fascinating bracelet, where you put a rubber band around your favorite book of poems for a year, and then you take it off and wear it.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
Time was passing like a hand waving from a train that I wanted to be on.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
And she would say, “Today you believe in God?” And he would say, “Today I believe in love”.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
It was one of the best days of my life, a day during which I lived my life and didn’t think about my life at all.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
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.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
We had everything to say to each other, but no ways to say it.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
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.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
He was someone whom everyone admired and liked but whom nobody knew. He was like a book that you could feel good holding, that you could talk about without ever having read, that you could recommend.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
We burned with love for ourselves, all of us, starters of the fire we suffered- our love was the affliction for which only our love was the cure.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
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.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER