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I'm sorry for my inability to let unimportant things go, for my inability to hold on to the important things.

Jonathan Safran Foer

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Jonathan Safran Foer
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: February 21
Novelist
Writer
Washington
District of Columbia
Unimportant
Inability
Sorry
Hold
Important
Things

More quotes by Jonathan Safran Foer

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My insides don't match up with my outsides. Do anyone's inside and outsides match up? I don't know. I'm only me. Maybe that's what a person's personality is: the difference between the inside and the outside.
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She maintained a careful balance by her window, never allowing the men to come too close, never allowing them to stray too far.
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I think after you live it's like before you lived.
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We were quiet on the car ride home. I turned on the radio and found a station playing Hey Jude. It was true, I didn't want to make it bad. I wanted to take the sad song and make it better. It's just that I didn't know how.
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When I heard your organization was recording testimonies, I knew I had to come. She died in my arms, saying 'I don't want to die.' That is what death is like. It doesn't matter what uniforms the soldiers are wearing. It doesn't matter how good the weapons are. I thought if everyone could see what I saw, we would never have war anymore.
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Parents are always more knowledgeable than their children, and children are always smarter than their parents.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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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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She said, Do you have more things that you need, or more that you don't need? I said, It depends on what it means to need.
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Compassion is a muscle that gets stronger with use, and the regular exercise of choosing kindness over cruelty would change us.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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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 am willing to be annoying if that's what was necessary.
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Books are slow, books are quiet. The Internet is fast and loud.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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So many people enter and leave your life! Hundreds of thousands of people! You have to keep the door open so they can come in! But it also means you have to let them go!
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Years were passing through the spaces between moments.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Is there really anyone, besides Rudy Giuliani, who prefers the new Times Square?
Jonathan Safran Foer
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If we communicated with something like music, we would never be misunderstood, because there is nothing in music to understand...... But until we find this new way of speaking, until we can find a nonapproximate vocabulary, nonsense words are the best thing we've got. Ifactifice is one such word.
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Writing's funny, it's like walking down a hall in the dark looking for the light switch, and suddenly you find it, flip it on, and then you discover the hallway you passed through is papered with the novel you've written.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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I'd lost count of the disappointments.
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To remember my values, I need to lose certain tastes and find other handles for the memories that they once helped me carry.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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None of the ways people were talking about September 11 felt right to me. I don't buy into the way George W. Bush talks about it. I don't buy into the way the 9/11 commission talks about it. It isn't that I don't believe them. It's just that they're not the tellings for me.
Jonathan Safran Foer