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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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I would have done anything for him. Maybe that was my sickness.
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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We looked at each other until it felt like everything would burst into flames
Jonathan Safran Foer
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There are two kinds of sculptures. There's the kind that subtracts: Michelangelo starts with a block of marble and chips away. And then there is the kind that adds, building with clay, piling it on. The way I write novels is to keep piling on and piling on and piling on.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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She wants to know if I love her, that's all anyone wants from anyone else, not love itself but the knowledge that love is there, like new batteries in the flashlight in the emergency kit in the hall closet.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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My insides don't match up with my outsides. Do anyone's inside and outsides match up? I don't know. I'm only me. Maybe that's what a person's personality is: the difference between the inside and the outside.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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I'm interested in the kind of religion that makes life harder. I'm not so interested in the comforting kind of religion.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Do you think I'm wonderful? she asked him one day as they leaned against the trunk of a petrified maple. No, he said. Why? Because so many girls are wonderful. I imagine hundreds of men have called their loves wonderful today, and it's only noon. You couldn't be something that hundreds of others are.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Why didn't he say goodbye? I gave myself a bruise. Why didn't he say 'I love you'?
Jonathan Safran Foer
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My point is that there are a lot of forces, like the media and the general political rhetoric tells us we should have more. That we should do better than our parents and have a bigger house or a better car.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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I went to the guest room and pretended to write. I hit the space bar again and again and again. My life story was spaces.
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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People hurt each other. That's what people do.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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She felt as if she were brimming, always producing and hoarding more love inside her. But there was no release.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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I could not believe in a God that would challenge faith like this.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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I am sure people tell you this constantly but if you looked up 'incredibly beautiful' in the dictionary there would be a picture of you.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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I can't even say 'hair pie,'' I told him, 'unless I'm talking about an actual pie made out of rabbits.
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 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
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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.
Jonathan Safran Foer