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I never confused what I had with what I was.

Jonathan Safran Foer

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Jonathan Safran Foer
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: February 21
Novelist
Writer
Washington
District of Columbia
Confused
Never

More quotes by 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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There are two kinds of sculptures. There's the kind that subtracts: Michelangelo starts with a block of marble and chips away. And then there is the kind that adds, building with clay, piling it on. The way I write novels is to keep piling on and piling on and piling on.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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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.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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I often think about how my sons will come to know about September 11th. Something overheard? A newspaper image? In school? I would prefer that they learn about it from my wife and me, in a deliberate and safe way. But it's hard to imagine ever feeling ready to broach the subject without some impetus.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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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.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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I wouldn't want a boy to think I was pretty unless he was the kind of boy who thought I was pretty.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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We shouldn't be intimidated by someone else's idea of perfection if it will prevent us from taking steps we actively want to take.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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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.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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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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If people thought about food more like how we think about the environment, a lot of people would be eating differently and the whole system would look a lot different.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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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?
Jonathan Safran Foer
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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.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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I try not to remember the life that I didn’t want to lose but lost and have to remember
Jonathan Safran Foer
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I flipped back through the pad of paper while I thought about what Stephen Hawking would do next.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Only now do I understand the war against boredom, the lost cause of empty hours, of empty days and nights.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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She laughed enough to migrate an entire flock of birds. That was how she said yes
Jonathan Safran Foer
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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.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Also, I designed a pretty fascinating bracelet, where you put a rubber band around your favorite book of poems for a year, and then you take it off and wear it.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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I did not need to know if he could love me. I needed to know if he could need me.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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[…] but I believe that things are extremely complicated, and her looking over me was as complicated as anything could ever be. But it was also incredibly simple.
Jonathan Safran Foer