Quote

Words are capable of making experience more vivid, and also of organizing it. They can scare us, and they can comfort us.

Jonathan Safran Foer

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Jonathan Safran Foer
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: February 21
Novelist
Writer
Washington
District of Columbia
Capable
Words
Making
Experience
Also
Organizing
Vivid
Scare
Comfort

More quotes by Jonathan Safran Foer

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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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It was getting hard to keep all the things I didn't know inside me.
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The writing itself is no big deal. The editing, and even more than that, the self-doubt, is excruciatingly impossible.
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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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And yet and yet - the last secret of the tree of codes is that nothing can ever reach a definite conclusion. Nowhere as much as there do we feel possibilities shaken by the nearness of realization. The atmosphere becomes possibilities and we shall wander and make a thousand mistakes. We shall wander along yet not be able to understand.
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Everyone performs bad actions... A bad person is someone who does not lament his bad actions.
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Because it was starting to get dark, and because the streets were crowded, I bumped into a googolplex people. Who were they? Where were they going? What were they looking for? I wanted to hear their heartbeats, and I wanted them to hear mine.
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and i wouldn't say no to something sweet.
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Can’t you even tell me if I’m on the right track? Buckminster purred, and Dad shrugged his shoulders again. But if you don’t tell me anything, how can I ever be right? He circled something in an article and said, Another way of looking at it would be, how could you ever be wrong?
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It is unrealistic to think you can have an inflexible identity that never has to give or take or make compromises.
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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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I think it's a greater risk not to write about 9\11. If you're in my position - a New Yorker who felt the event very deeply and a writer who wants to write about things he feels deeply about - I think it's risky to avoid what's right in front of you.
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Highs and lows make you feel that things matter, but they're nothing. So what's something? Being reliable is something. Being good.
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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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Everything is the way it is because everything was the way it was
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You're incredibly beautiful,' I told her, because she was fat, so I thought it would be an especially nice compliment, and also make her like me again, even though I was sexist.
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Choosing leaf or flesh, factory farm or family farm, does not in itself change the world, but teaching ourselves, our children, our local communities, and our nation to choose conscience over ease can.
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I used to think that humor was the only way to appreciate how wonderful and terrible the world is, to celebrate how big life is. But now I think the opposite. Humor is a way of shrinking from that wonderful and terrible world.
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How beautiful is forgetting! What relief it would be for the world to lose some of its contents.
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This brings me back to the image of Kafka standing before a fish in the Berlin aquarium, a fish on which his gaze fell in a newly found peace after he decided not to eat animals. Kafka recognized that fish as a member of his invisible family- not as his equal, of course, but as another being that was his concern.
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