Art can be very political but that can’t be the purpose of art, it can’t be the driving force. It isn’t with any of the books that I love, anyway.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERWhen we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own.
More Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes
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Feeding my children is not like feeding myself: it matters more.
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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.
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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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Of course food has an important cultural use in families, but there are things that have more important cultural uses in families, and broadening the conversation out simply from what’s reasonable also allows in other things.
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Sadness of not knowing enough words to [express what you mean].
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But come. No explaining or mending. Be beside me somewhere.
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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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My life story is the story of everyone I’ve ever met.
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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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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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As long as I am thinking, I am alive.
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Sometimes you have to put your fears in order.
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I tried the key in all the doors, even though he said he didn’t recognize it. It’s not that I didn’t trust him, becuase I did. It’s that at the end of my search I wanted to be able to say: I don’t know how I could have tried harder.
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Worthy would-be worlds of words, whorls of working wonder.
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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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I thought for a minute, and then I got heavy, heavy boots.
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Why does watching a dog be a dog fill one with happiness?
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This 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.
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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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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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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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We could imagine all sorts of universes unlike this one, but this is the one that happened.
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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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It is not a thing that you can imagine. It only is. After that, there can be no imagining.
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She laughed enough to migrate an entire flock of birds. That was how she said yes.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER