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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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Jonathan Safran Foer
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: February 21
Novelist
Writer
Washington
District of Columbia
Looking
Bumped
Dark
Heartbeat
Wanted
Crowded
Going
Starting
People
Mines
Mine
Streets
Hear
Heartbeats

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The writing itself is no big deal. The editing, and even more than that, the self-doubt, is excruciatingly impossible.
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When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own.
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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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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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We all choose things, and we also all choose against things. I want to be the kind of person who chooses for more than chooses against.
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I did not need to know if he could love me. I needed to know if he could need me.
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That’s all anyone wants from anyone else, not love itself but the knowledge that love is there.
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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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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.
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The question, I've come to think, is not what inspires one to change, but what inspires one to remain changed.
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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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People who become used to saying little become used to feeling little.
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Words never mean what we want them to mean.
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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.
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Songs are as sad as the listener.
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People hurt each other. That's what people do.
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I like to see people reunited, I like to see people run to each other, I like the kissing and the crying, I like the impatience, the stories that the mouth can't tell fast enough, the ears that aren't big enough, the eyes that can't take in all of the change, I like the hugging, the bringing together, the end of missing someone.
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