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A few weeks after the worst day, I started writing lots of letters. I don't know why, but it was one of the only things that made my boots lighter.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Jonathan Safran Foer
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: February 21
Novelist
Writer
Washington
District of Columbia
Worst
Lighters
Writing
Lighter
Made
Boots
Things
Weeks
Lots
Letters
Started
Week
More quotes by Jonathan Safran Foer
Just about every children's book in my local bookstore has an animal for its hero. But then, only a few feet away in the cookbook section, just about every cookbook includes recipes for cooking animals. Is there a more illuminating illustration of our paradoxical relationship with the nonhuman world?
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We aren’t exactly emptying the oceans it’s more like clear-cutting a forest with thousands of species to create massive fields with one type of soybean.
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I wanted to touch him, to tell him that even if everyone left everyone, I would never leave him, he talked and talked, his words fell through him, trying to find the floor to his sadness.
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I dreamt four nights ago of clock hands descending from the universe like rain, of the moon as a green eye, of mirrors and insects, of a love that never withdrew. It was not the feeling of completeness that I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Nine out of ten significant people have to do with money or war!
Jonathan Safran Foer
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.
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I never confused what I had with what I was.
Jonathan Safran Foer
I got tired, I told him. Not worn out, but worn through. Like one of those wives who wakes up one morning and says I can't bake any more bread.
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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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Eating a piece of meat, at its most efficient, we could say is like throwing away six times that amount of food every time you eat it because you're recycling all those calories through it. I know a lot of people who came to this issue not through animal welfare but through wastefulness.
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Do you think I'm wonderful? she asked him one day as they leaned against the trunk of a petrified maple. No, he said. Why? Because so many girls are wonderful. I imagine hundreds of men have called their loves wonderful today, and it's only noon. You couldn't be something that hundreds of others are.
Jonathan Safran Foer
In truth I was manufacturing a brick wall of shits.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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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What is suffering? I'm not sure what it is, but I know that suffering is the name we give to the origin of all the sighs, screams, and groans — small and large, crude and multifaceted — that concern us. The word defines our gaze even more than what we are looking at.
Jonathan Safran Foer
What were we spending so much time doing if not getting to know each other?
Jonathan Safran Foer
I want an infinitely blank book and the rest of time.
Jonathan Safran Foer
People who become used to saying little become used to feeling little.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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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When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own.
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We need enormous pockets, pockets big enough for our families and our friends, and even the people who aren't on our lists, people we've never met but still want to protect. We need pockets for boroughs and for cities, a pocket that could hold the universe.
Jonathan Safran Foer
