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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
Lived
Live
Think
Thinking
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More quotes by Jonathan Safran Foer

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Well, what I don't get is why do we exist? I don't mean how, but why.' I watched the fireflies of his thoughts orbit his head. He said, 'we exist because we exist. . .we could imagine all sorts of universes like this one, but this is the one that happened.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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The word vegetarian, I think, does a disservice because there are a lot of people who care but maybe don't care, or can't care in an ultimate way. If you think about environmentalism, nobody would ask, Are you an environmentalist or not? The question doesn't make any sense.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Flea-Market vendors are frozen mid-haggle. Middle-aged women are frozen in the middle of their lives. The gavels of frozen judges are frozen between guilt and innocence. On the ground are the crystals of the frozen first breaths of babies, and those of the last gasps of the dying.
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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How beautiful is forgetting! What relief it would be for the world to lose some of its contents.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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August has passed, and yet summer continues by force to grow days. They sprout secretly between the chapters of the year, covertly included between its pages.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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I looked at everyone and wondered where they came from, and who they missed, and what they were sorry for.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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It is not a thing that you can imagine. It only is. After that, there can be no imagining.
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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One of the greatest opportunities to live our values-or betray them-lies in the food we put on our plates.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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I wanted to hit him. I wanted to hold him. I wanted to shout myself into his ear.
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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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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We are not long-term beings. Not heroes of romances in many volumes. For one gesture, for one word alone, we shall make the effort. We openly admit: our creations will be temporary. We shall have this as our aim: a gesture.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Grandfather informs me that is not possible.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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We are lying to ourselves and to each other. Lying about what? I don't care if we're lying. I am a bad person. I don't care. I don't care what you are.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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I would have done anything for him. Maybe that was my sickness.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Am I such a bad person for dreaming of a world that ends when I do? I don't mean the world ending with respect to me, but every set of eyes closing with mine.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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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.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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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.
Jonathan Safran Foer