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It was not the feeling of completeness I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty.

Jonathan Safran Foer

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Jonathan Safran Foer
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: February 21
Novelist
Writer
Washington
District of Columbia
Feelings
Life
Completeness
Emptiness
Empty
Needed
Feeling

More quotes by Jonathan Safran Foer

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Words never mean what we want them to mean.
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If people thought about food more like how we think about the environment, a lot of people would be eating differently and the whole system would look a lot different.
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Songs are as sad as the listener.
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Memory was supposed to fill the time, but it made time a hole to be filled. Each second was two hundred yards, to be walked, crawled. You couldn't see the next hour, it was so far in the distance. Tomorrow was over the horizon, and would take an entire day to reach.
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I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live.
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I often think about how my sons will come to know about September 11th. Something overheard? A newspaper image? In school? I would prefer that they learn about it from my wife and me, in a deliberate and safe way. But it's hard to imagine ever feeling ready to broach the subject without some impetus.
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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.
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And here I am, instead of there. I'm sitting in this library, thousands of miles from my life, writing another letter I know I won't be able to send, no matter how hard I try and how much I want to. How did that boy making love behind that shed become this man writing this letter at this table?
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Why do I write? It's not that I want people to think I am smart, or even that I am a good writer. I write because I want to end my loneliness.
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She extended a hand that I didn't know how to take, so I broke its fingers with my silence.
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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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It's the tragedy of loving, you can't love anything more than something you miss.
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He Wrote, Are you OK? I told him, My eyes are crummy. He wrote, But are you OK? I told him, That's a very complicated question. He wrote, That's a very simple answer. I asked, Are you OK? He wrote, Some mornings I wake up feeling grateful.
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Only now do I understand the war against boredom, the lost cause of empty hours, of empty days and nights.
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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.
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A few weeks after the worst day, I started writing lots of letters. I don't know why, but it was one of the only things that made my boots lighter.
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Compassion is a muscle that gets stronger with use, and the regular exercise of choosing kindness over cruelty would change us.
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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.
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If we were to one day encounter a form of life more powerful and intelligent than our own, and it regarded us as we regard fish, what would be our argument against being eaten?
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Everything is the way it is because everything was the way it was
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