She wanted more, more slang, more figures of speech, the bee’s knees, the cats pajamas, horse of a different color, dog-tired, she wanted to talk like she was born here, like she never came from anywhere else
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERI have so much to say to you. I want to begin at the beginning, because that is what you deserve. I want to tell you everything, without leaving out a single detail. But where is the beginning? And what is everything?
More Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes
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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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People with nothing to declare carry the most.
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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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Words are capable of making experience more vivid, and also of organizing it. They can scare us, and they can comfort us.
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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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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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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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When I looked at you, my life made sense. Even the bad things made sense. They were necessary to make you possible.
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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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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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I put my hand on the doorknob because I thought maybe her hand was on the doorknob on the other side.
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The philosopher Elaine Scarry has observed that “beauty always takes place in the particular.” Cruelty, on the other hand, prefers abstraction.
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It’s hard to say goodbye to the place you’ve lived. It can be as hard as saying goodbye to a person.
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We had everything to say to each other, but no ways to say it.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER