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 FOERPeople with nothing to declare carry the most.
More Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes
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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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One of the greatest opportunities to live our values-or betray them-lies in the food we put on our plates.
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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?
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You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.
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In my family, Father is the world champion at ending conversations.
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Words never mean what we want them to mean.
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I wasn’t having second thoughts, but I was having thoughts.
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But I believe that things are extremely complicated, and her looking over me was as complicated as anything could ever be. But it was also incredibly simple.
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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.
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I can only hold on to the things I want to lose.
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I got incredibly heavy boots about how relatively insignificant life is, and how, compared to the universe and compared to time, it didn’t even matter if I existed at all.
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I never confused what I had with what I was.
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I felt shame for living in a nation of unprecedented prosperity-a nation that spends a smaller percentage of income on food than any other civilization has in human history-but in the name of affordability treats the animals it eats with cruelty so extreme it would be illegal if inflicted on a dog.
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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 regret that it takes a life to learn how to live.
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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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No matter how much I feel, I’m not going to let it out. If I have to cry, I’m gonna cry on the inside. If I have to bleed, I’ll bruise. If my heart starts going crazy, I’m not gonna tell everyone in the world about it. It doesn’t help anything. It just makes everyone’s life worse.
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I shook my tambourine the whole time, because it helped me remember that even though I was going through different neighborhoods, I was still me.
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Part of living your life is an awareness of the opportunities that can be missed and an awareness that time moves in one direction.
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She was with me. She did all of those things and so many more, things I would never tell anyone, and she never even loved me. Now that’s love.
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I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love.
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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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My point is that there are a lot of forces, like the media and the general political rhetoric tells us we should have more. That we should do better than our parents and have a bigger house or a better car.
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Time was passing like a hand waving from a train that I wanted to be on.
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It’s the tragedy of loving, you can’t love anything more than something you miss.
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We live in a world made up more of story than stuff. We are creatures of memory more than reminders, of love more than likes.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER