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.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERThis 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.
More Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes
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I wish my days could be washed away like the chalk lines of my days.
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Everything else happened – why not the things that could have?
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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 -
He promised us that everything would be okay. I was a child, but I knew that everything would not be okay. That did not make my father a liar. It made him my father.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
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.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
Every factory-farmed animal is, as a practice, treated in ways that would be illegal if it were a dog or a cat.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.
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 -
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 -
Everything is to protect you. I exist in case you need to be protected.
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I looked at everyone and wondered where they came from, and who they missed, and what they were sorry for.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
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 only thing more painful than being an active forgetter is to be an inert rememberer.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
I’m sorry for my inability to let unimportant things go, for my inability to hold on to the important things.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
If we communicated with something like music, we would never be misunderstood, because there is nothing in music to understand.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER