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I wasn’t having second thoughts, but I was having thoughts.

Jonathan Safran Foer

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Jonathan Safran Foer
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: February 21
Novelist
Writer
Washington
District of Columbia
Second
Wasn
Thoughts

More quotes by Jonathan Safran Foer

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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.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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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.
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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We often use technology to save time, but increasingly, it either takes the saved time along with it, or makes the saved time less present, intimate and rich. I worry that the closer the world gets to our fingertips, the further it gets from our hearts.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Love...is the immovability of truth.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Humans are the only animal that blushes, laughs, has religion, wages war, and kisses with lips. So in a way, the more you kiss with lips, the more human you are. And the more you wage war.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Do you eat chicken because you are familiar with the scientific literature on them and have decided that their suffering doesn't matter, or do you do it because it tastes good?
Jonathan Safran Foer
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I thought for a minute, and then I got heavy, heavy boots.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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I realized that your mother couldn't see the emptiness, she couldn't see anything...All of the words I'd written to her over all of those years, had I never said anything to hear at all?
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Stories about food are stories about us-our history and our values.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Abraham responds Here I am when God asks him to sacrifice his son, and he answers Here I am when his son asks him about what is happening. It's a paradoxical moment. He can't be fully present for his God or his son.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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I took the world into me, rearranged it, and sent it back out as a question: Do you like me?
Jonathan Safran Foer
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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.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Try to live so that you can always tell the truth.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Not responding is a response--we are equally responsible for what we don't do. In the case of animal slaughter, to throw your hands in the air is to wrap your fingers around a knife handle.
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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I write because I want to end my loneliness. Books make people less alone. That, before and after everything else, is what books do. They show us that conversations are possible across distances.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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I want an infinitely blank book and the rest of time.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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I said, 'I need to know how he died.' He flipped back and pointed at, 'Why?' So I can stop inventing how he died. I'm always inventing.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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While it is always possible to wake a person who's sleeping, no amount of noise will wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.
Jonathan Safran Foer