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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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I'm sorry for my inability to let unimportant things go, for my inability to hold on to the important things.
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My test for writing is always, is this fun or does it feel like a job? Is it moving me? Or am I just fulfilling my own expectations - or even worse, somebody else's?
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It was terrible. All of the things we couldn't share. The room was filled with conversations we weren't having.
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Why do beautiful songs make you sad?' 'Because they aren't true.' 'Never?' 'Nothing is beautiful and true.
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The writing itself is no big deal. The editing, and even more than that, the self-doubt, is excruciatingly impossible.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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They reciprocated the great and saving lie--that our love for things is greater than our lover for our love for things--willfully playing the parts they wrote for themselves, willfully creating and believing fictions necessary for life.
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In my family, Father is the world champion at ending conversations.
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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.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Why are you leaving me? He wrote, I do not know how to live. I do not know either but I am trying. I do not know how to try. There were some things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him. So i buried them and let them hurt me
Jonathan Safran Foer
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She was with me. She did all of those things and so many more, things I would never tell anyone, and she never even loved me. Now that’s love.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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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.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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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.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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There has yet to be a human to survive a span of history without at least one end of the world.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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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?
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Raising your kids vegetarian is a great way to encourage them to do the opposite of what you want! But the goal is not to have them have the same values that I have. It's to have them act on their values.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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She saw through the shell of me into the center of me
Jonathan Safran Foer
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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.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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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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I 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?
Jonathan Safran Foer
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I didn't intend to write about totems or people searching. I tried not to constrain myself, and this is what I ended up with. There's this great Auden quote: I look at what I write so I can see what I think.
Jonathan Safran Foer