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Words never mean what we want them to mean.

Jonathan Safran Foer

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Jonathan Safran Foer
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: February 21
Novelist
Writer
Washington
District of Columbia
Words
Language
Mean
Never

More quotes by Jonathan Safran Foer

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She brushed her eyelashes against his chest.
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 missed you even when I was with you. That’s been my problem. I miss what I already have, and I surround myself with things that are missing.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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When I heard your organization was recording testimonies, I knew I had to come. She died in my arms, saying 'I don't want to die.' That is what death is like. It doesn't matter what uniforms the soldiers are wearing. It doesn't matter how good the weapons are. I thought if everyone could see what I saw, we would never have war anymore.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Our love was the affliction for which only our love was the cure.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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I wouldn't want a boy to think I was pretty unless he was the kind of boy who thought I was pretty.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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In my family, Father is the world champion at ending conversations.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Everything is the way it is because everything was the way it was. Sometimes I feel ensnared in this, as if no matter what I do, what will come has already been fixed.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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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
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If we are not given the option to live without violence, we are given the choice to center our meals around harvest or slaughter, husbandry or war. We have chosen slaughter. We have chosen war. That's the truest version of our story of eating animals. Can we tell a new story?
Jonathan Safran Foer
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That’s all anyone wants from anyone else, not love itself but the knowledge that love is there.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Sometimes I can feel my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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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.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Why are you leaving me? He wrote, I do not know how to live. I do not know either but I am trying. I do not know how to try. There were some things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him. So i buried them and let them hurt me
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Oh, I'd say I like a meal as much as anybody. But I find a certain kind of foodiness silly, gluttonous and embarrassing.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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I'd lost count of the disappointments.
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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But what she was really trying to say was this: I like music better than anything in the world, after you.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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If we communicated with something like music, we would never be misunderstood, because there is nothing in music to understand...... But until we find this new way of speaking, until we can find a nonapproximate vocabulary, nonsense words are the best thing we've got. Ifactifice is one such word.
Jonathan Safran Foer