I wish my days could be washed away like the chalk lines of my days.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERIt’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.
More Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes
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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.
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Writers now are putting total faith in designers at Apple and Amazon. It’s almost like a race-car driver having no input into how cars are designed.
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I watched the sheets breathe when she breathed, like how Dad used to say that trees inhale when people exhale, because I was too young to understand the truth about biological processes.
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Isn’t it strange how upset people get about a few dozen baseball players taking growth hormones, when we’re doing what we’re doing to our food animals and feeding them to our children?
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You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.
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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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I do think ordinariness is, in a way, the enemy, but not ordinariness as the opposite of flamboyance.
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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.
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Every factory-farmed animal is, as a practice, treated in ways that would be illegal if it were a dog or a cat.
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When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much.
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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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I got incredibly heavy boots about how relatively insignificant life is, and how, compared to the universe and compared to time, it didn’t even matter if I existed at all.
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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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Time was passing like a hand waving from a train that I wanted to be on.
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We are lying to ourselves and to each other. Lying about what? I don’t care if we’re lying. I am a bad person. I don’t care. I don’t care what you are.
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Every moment before this one depends on this one.
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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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I felt suddenly shy. I was not used to shy. I was used to shame. Shyness is when you turn your head away from something you want. Shame is when you turn your head away from something you do not want.
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We had everything to say to each other, but no ways to say it.
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Everything I did, I did because I thought it was the correct thing to do, I am not a hero, it is true, But I am not a bad person, either.
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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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Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?
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The only thing more painful than being an active forgetter is to be an inert rememberer.
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Sometimes I imagined stitching all of our little touches together. How many hundreds of thousands of fingers brushing against each other does it take to make love? Why does anyone ever make love?
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It can be challenge enough to have to eat with myself.
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We shared the smile of recognizing ourselves in each other, how many imposters do I have? Do we all make the same mistakes, or has one of us gotten it right, or even just a bit less wrong, am I the imposter?
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER