Memory was supposed to fill the time, but it made time a hole to be filled. Each second was two hundred yards, to be walked, crawled. You couldn’t see the next hour, it was so far in the distance. Tomorrow was over the horizon, and would take an entire day to reach.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERIt 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?
More Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes
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I looked at everyone and wondered where they came from, and who they missed, and what they were sorry for.
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She laughed enough to migrate an entire flock of birds. That was how she said yes.
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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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One day you will do things for me that you hate. That is what it means to be family.
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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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I wasn’t trying to invent better and better homes, but to show her that homes didn’t matter, we could live in any home, in any city, in any country, in any century, and be happy, as if the world were just what we lived in.
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If we communicated with something like music, we would never be misunderstood, because there is nothing in music to understand.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own.
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Shyness is when you turn your head away from something you want.
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Songs are as sad as the listener.
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I do think ordinariness is, in a way, the enemy, but not ordinariness as the opposite of flamboyance.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
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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It has shown me that everything is illuminated in the light of the past. It is always along the side of us…on the inside, looking out.
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You are the only one who has understood even a whisper of me, and I will tell you that I am the only person who has understood even a whisper of you.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
We spent our lives making livings.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER