Songs are as sad as the listener.
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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There are only some many times you can utter “It does not hurt” before it begins to hurt even more than the hurt.
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Everything that’s born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they’re all on fire, and we’re all trapped.
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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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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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So many people enter and leave your life! Hundreds of thousands of people! You have to keep the door open so they can come in! But it also means you have to let them go!
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I do think ordinariness is, in a way, the enemy, but not ordinariness as the opposite of flamboyance.
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She laughed enough to migrate an entire flock of birds. That was how she said yes.
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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.
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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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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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Every moment before this one depends on this one.
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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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We believed in our grandmother’s cooking more fervently than we believed in God.
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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 could imagine all sorts of universes unlike this one, but this is the one that happened.
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We spent our lives making livings.
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The bruises go away, and so does how you hate, and so does the feeling that everything you receive from life is something you have earned.
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Not responding is a response–we are equally responsible for what we don’t do. In the case of animal slaughter, to throw your hands in the air is to wrap your fingers around a knife handle.
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There’s nothing wrong with not understanding yourself.
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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 the thrill of hunting were in the hunt, or even in the marksmanship, a camera would do just as well.
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Shyness is when you turn your head away from something you want.
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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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Ninety-nine percent of all land animals eaten or used to produce milk and eggs in the United States are factory farmed. So although there are important exceptions, to speak about eating animals today is to speak about factory farming.
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It’s so beautiful at this hour. The sun is low, the shadows are long, the air is cold and clean. You won’t be awake for another five hours, but I can’t help feeling that we’re sharing this clear and beautiful morning.
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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.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER