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I think after you live it's like before you lived.

Jonathan Safran Foer

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Jonathan Safran Foer
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: February 21
Novelist
Writer
Washington
District of Columbia
Think
Thinking
Like
Lived
Live

More quotes by Jonathan Safran Foer

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It took me as long as I had known him to get rid of all of his words. Like turning an hourglass over.
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.
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I watched the sheets breathe when she breathed, like how Dad used to say that trees inhale when people exhale, because I was too young to understand the truth about biological processes.
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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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You only get to keep what you refuse to let go of.
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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We could imagine all sorts of universes unlike this one, but this is the one that happened.
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?
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Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does.
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I said, 'I need to know how he died.' He flipped back and pointed at, 'Why?' So I can stop inventing how he died. I'm always inventing.
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He removed several pages of death certificates, which were picked up by another breeze and sent into the trees. Some would fall with the leaves that September. Some would fall with the trees generations later.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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As a writer, putting words on the page is how I pay attention.
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.
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He promised us that everything would be okay. I was a child, but I knew that everything would not be okay. That did not make my father a liar. It made him my father.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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It was getting hard to keep all the things I didn't know inside me.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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We are being very nomadic with the truth, yes?
Jonathan Safran Foer
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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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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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I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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I desperately wish I had my tambourine with me now, because even after everything I'm still wearing heavy boots, and sometimes it helps to play a good beat
Jonathan Safran Foer