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Everything else happened - why not the things that could have?

Jonathan Safran Foer

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Jonathan Safran Foer
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: February 21
Novelist
Writer
Washington
District of Columbia
Happened
Else
Everything
Things

More quotes by 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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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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Kids are a great analogy. You want your kids to grow up, and you don't want your kids to grow up. You want your kids to become independent of you, but it's also a parent's worst nightmare: That they won't need you. It's like the real tragedy of parenting.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Weeks passed like boats waiting to sail into the starless dawn, we were full of aimless endless darkness.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Dear Anna, we will live in a home with no walls, so that everywhere we go will be our home.
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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Maybe I'll try to be more patient with morons.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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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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Everyone performs bad actions... A bad person is someone who does not lament his bad actions.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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In the water I saw my father's face, and that face saw the face of its father, and so on, and so on, reflecting backward to the beginning of time, to the face of God, in whose image we were created.
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
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Food is not rational. Food is culture, habit, and identity.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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What is suffering? I'm not sure what it is, but I know that suffering is the name we give to the origin of all the sighs, screams, and groans — small and large, crude and multifaceted — that concern us. The word defines our gaze even more than what we are looking at.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Living on a planet of fixed size requires compromise, and while we are the only party capable of negotiating, we are not the only party at the table. We've never claimed more, and we've never had less.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Flea-Market vendors are frozen mid-haggle. Middle-aged women are frozen in the middle of their lives. The gavels of frozen judges are frozen between guilt and innocence. On the ground are the crystals of the frozen first breaths of babies, and those of the last gasps of the dying.
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 think after you live it's like before you lived.
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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What does it remember like?
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Imagine being served a plate of sushi. But this plate also holds all of the animals that were killed for your serving of sushi. The plate might have to be five feet across.
Jonathan Safran Foer