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Can’t you even tell me if I’m on the right track? Buckminster purred, and Dad shrugged his shoulders again. But if you don’t tell me anything, how can I ever be right? He circled something in an article and said, Another way of looking at it would be, how could you ever be wrong?

Jonathan Safran Foer

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Jonathan Safran Foer
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: February 21
Novelist
Writer
Washington
District of Columbia
Way
Wrong
Circled
Would
Tell
Shrugged
Another
Article
Anything
Articles
Ever
Shoulders
Right
Dad
Even
Track
Something
Looking
Purred

More quotes by Jonathan Safran Foer

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I felt suddenly shy. I was not used to shy. I was used to shame. Shyness is when you turn your head away from something you want. Shame is when you turn your head away from something you do not want.
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I wasn’t having second thoughts, but I was having thoughts.
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We eat as sons and daughters, as families, as communities, as generations, as nations, and increasingly as a globe. We can't stop our eating from radiating influence even if we want to.
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Cruelty depends on an understanding of cruelty, and the ability to choose against it. Or to choose to ignore it.
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We shouldn't be intimidated by someone else's idea of perfection if it will prevent us from taking steps we actively want to take.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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We could imagine all sorts of universes unlike this one, but this is the one that happened.
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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She extended a hand that I didn't know how to take, so I broke its fingers with my silence.
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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.
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I looked at everyone and wondered where they came from, and who they missed, and what they were sorry for.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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He was someone whom everyone admired and liked but whom nobody knew. He was like a book that you could feel good holding, that you could talk about without ever having read, that you could recommend.
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You can call your turkey organic and torture it daily.
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None of the ways people were talking about September 11 felt right to me. I don't buy into the way George W. Bush talks about it. I don't buy into the way the 9/11 commission talks about it. It isn't that I don't believe them. It's just that they're not the tellings for me.
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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We need enormous pockets, pockets big enough for our families and our friends, and even the people who aren't on our lists, people we've never met but still want to protect. We need pockets for boroughs and for cities, a pocket that could hold the universe.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Because it was starting to get dark, and because the streets were crowded, I bumped into a googolplex people. Who were they? Where were they going? What were they looking for? I wanted to hear their heartbeats, and I wanted them to hear mine.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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It took me as long as I had known him to get rid of all of his words. Like turning an hourglass over.
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.
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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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I shook my tambourine the whole time, because it helped me remember that even though I was going through different neighborhoods, I was still me.
Jonathan Safran Foer