I felt, that night, on that stage, under that skull, incredibly close to everything in the universe, but also extremely alone.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERI 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.
More Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes
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I never confused what I had with what I was.
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I missed you even when I was with you. That’s been my problem. I miss what I already have, and I surround myself with things that are missing.
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Silently the animal catches our glance. The animal looks at us, and whether we look away or not, we are exposed. Whether we change our lives or do nothing, we have responded. To do nothing is to do something.
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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.
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Just to be a functioning adult in the world, we develop all of these layers of protection. When we see homeless people, we don’t cry, even though homeless people probably deserve our tears – you know, it’s a horrible thing.
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She let out a laugh, and then she put her hand over her mouth, like she was angry at herself for forgetting her sadness.
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The animals are those things that God likes but doesn’t love.
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I was of the opinion that the past is past, and like all that is not now it should remain buried along the side of our memories.
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I want an infinitely blank book and the rest of time.
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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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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.
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Time was passing like a hand waving from a train that I wanted to be on.
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This is love, she thought, isn’t it? When you notice someone’s absence and hate that absence more than anything? More, even, than you love his presence?
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The meaning of my thoughts started to float away from me, like leaves that fall from a tree into a river, I was the tree, the world was the river.
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The more you love someone, he came to think, the harder it is to tell them. It surprised him that strangers didn’t stop each other on the street to say I love you.
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Why does watching a dog be a dog fill one with happiness?
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She avoids mirrors, and lifts a powerful telescope to find herself.
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Not responding is a response – we are equally responsible for what we don’t do.
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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?
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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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I was more alone than if I had been alone.
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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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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.
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If we communicated with something like music, we would never be misunderstood, because there is nothing in music to understand.
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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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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