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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

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[…] but I believe that things are extremely complicated, and her looking over me was as complicated as anything could ever be. But it was also incredibly simple.
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Everything is to protect you. I exist in case you need to be protected.
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Why didn't he say goodbye? I gave myself a bruise. Why didn't he say 'I love you'?
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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.
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Sometimes I can feel my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.
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There's nothing wrong with not understanding yourself.
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She said, Do you have more things that you need, or more that you don't need? I said, It depends on what it means to need.
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I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live.
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Well, what I don't get is why do we exist? I don't mean how, but why.' I watched the fireflies of his thoughts orbit his head. He said, 'we exist because we exist. . .we could imagine all sorts of universes like this one, but this is the one that happened.
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I am always sad, I think. Perhaps this signifies that I am not sad at all, because sadness is something lower than your normal disposition, and I am always the same thing. Perhaps I am the only person in the world, then, who never becomes sad. Perhaps I am lucky.
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Everything is the way it is because everything was the way it was
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I need an office, so I can have a place where I don't write.
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Why do beautiful songs make you sad?' 'Because they aren't true.' 'Never?' 'Nothing is beautiful and true.
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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.
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