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Everything is the way it is because everything was the way it was

Jonathan Safran Foer

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Jonathan Safran Foer
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: February 21
Novelist
Writer
Washington
District of Columbia
Everything
Way

More quotes by Jonathan Safran Foer

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I'm interested in the kind of religion that makes life harder. I'm not so interested in the comforting kind of religion.
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
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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.
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...people with nothing to declare carry the most.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Stories about food are stories about us-our history and our values.
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I didn't feel empty. I wished I'd felt empty. ... I wanted to be empty like an overturned pitcher. But I was full like a stone.
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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 not the feeling of completeness I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty.
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Books are for those without real lives, he thought. And they are no real replacement.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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We looked at each other until it felt like everything would burst into flames
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Everything else happened - why not the things that could have?
Jonathan Safran Foer
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All really great artists, Jackson Pollack, John Cage, Beckett or Joyce - you are never indifferent to them.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Instead of singing in the shower, I would write out the lyrics of my favourite songs, the ink would turn the water blue or red or green, and the music would run down my legs.
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In my family, Father is the world champion at ending conversations.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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The dissolution of a family, global crisis creates the massive fracture, not only in the Middle East but between America and Israel, between Europe and Israel, between American Jews and Israeli Jews. The distances seem to be widening wherever you look.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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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
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I'm deeply curious about Jewish things. I've toyed around with the idea of going to rabbinical school.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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...he enclosed pieces of string that he used to measure out his body--his head, thigh, forearm, finger, neck, everything. He wanted me to sleep with them under my pillow. He said that when he came back, we would remeasure his body against the string as proof that he hadn't changed.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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I wondered, for the first time in my life, if life was worth all the work it took to live. What exactly made it worth it?
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