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It was getting hard to keep all the things I didn't know inside me.

Jonathan Safran Foer

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Jonathan Safran Foer
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: February 21
Novelist
Writer
Washington
District of Columbia
Inside
Getting
Keep
Didn
Hard
Things

More quotes by Jonathan Safran Foer

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Just about every children's book in my local bookstore has an animal for its hero. But then, only a few feet away in the cookbook section, just about every cookbook includes recipes for cooking animals. Is there a more illuminating illustration of our paradoxical relationship with the nonhuman world?
Jonathan Safran Foer
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In truth I was manufacturing a brick wall of shits.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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And yet and yet - the last secret of the tree of codes is that nothing can ever reach a definite conclusion. Nowhere as much as there do we feel possibilities shaken by the nearness of realization. The atmosphere becomes possibilities and we shall wander and make a thousand mistakes. We shall wander along yet not be able to understand.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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I did not need to know if he could love me. I needed to know if he could need me.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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He promised us that everything would be okay. I was a child, but I knew that everything would not be okay. That did not make my father a liar. It made him my father.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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I'm interested in the kind of religion that makes life harder. I'm not so interested in the comforting kind of religion.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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How beautiful is forgetting! What relief it would be for the world to lose some of its contents.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Sometimes I imagined stitching all of our little touches together. How many hundreds of thousands of fingers brushing against each other does it take to make love? Why does anyone ever make love?
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Only now do I understand the war against boredom, the lost cause of empty hours, of empty days and nights.
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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Succotash my Balzac, dipshiitake.
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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Songs are as sad as the listener.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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The writing itself is no big deal. The editing, and even more than that, the self-doubt, is excruciatingly impossible.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Words are capable of making experience more vivid, and also of organizing it. They can scare us, and they can comfort us.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Is there really anyone, besides Rudy Giuliani, who prefers the new Times Square?
Jonathan Safran Foer
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We are lying to ourselves and to each other. Lying about what? I don't care if we're lying. I am a bad person. I don't care. I don't care what you are.
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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This brings me back to the image of Kafka standing before a fish in the Berlin aquarium, a fish on which his gaze fell in a newly found peace after he decided not to eat animals. Kafka recognized that fish as a member of his invisible family- not as his equal, of course, but as another being that was his concern.
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