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Something having been done just about everywhere just about always is no kind of justification for doing it now.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Jonathan Safran Foer
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: February 21
Novelist
Writer
Washington
District of Columbia
Everywhere
Done
Kind
Something
Always
Justification
More quotes by Jonathan Safran Foer
Every night before putting her to sleep, Yankel counts her ribs, as if one might have disappeared in the course of the day and become the seed and soil for some new companion to steal her away from him.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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
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
I'd lost count of the disappointments.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Everything that's born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they're all on fire, and we're all trapped.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Weeks passed like boats waiting to sail into the starless dawn, we were full of aimless endless darkness.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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
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
I saw Herschel and he saw me and we stood next to each other because that is what friends do in the presence of evil or love.
Jonathan Safran Foer
It would be possible, in theory, for life and art to be reversed.
Jonathan Safran Foer
What were we spending so much time doing if not getting to know each other?
Jonathan Safran Foer
Why I'm not where you are ...
Jonathan Safran Foer
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
[…] 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
This brings me back to the image of Kafka standing before a fish in the Berlin aquarium, a fish on which his gaze fell in a newly found peace after he decided not to eat animals. Kafka recognized that fish as a member of his invisible family- not as his equal, of course, but as another being that was his concern.
Jonathan Safran Foer
I see myself as someone who makes things. Definitions have never done anything but constrain.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Part of living your life is an awareness of the opportunities that can be missed and an awareness that time moves in one direction.
Jonathan Safran Foer
We need a better way to talk about eating animals, a way that doesn't ignore, or even just shruggingly accept things like habits, cravings, family and history, but rather incorporates them into the conversation. The more they are allowed in, the more strongly we will want to follow our best instincts.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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
