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If I’d been someone else in a different world I’d've done something different, but I was myself and the world was the world, so I was silent.

Jonathan Safran Foer

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Jonathan Safran Foer
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: February 21
Novelist
Writer
Washington
District of Columbia
World
Silent
Else
Someone
Done
Different
Something

More quotes by Jonathan Safran Foer

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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 were quiet on the car ride home. I turned on the radio and found a station playing Hey Jude. It was true, I didn't want to make it bad. I wanted to take the sad song and make it better. It's just that I didn't know how.
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Songs are as sad as the listener.
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I dreamt four nights ago of clock hands descending from the universe like rain, of the moon as a green eye, of mirrors and insects, of a love that never withdrew. It was not the feeling of completeness that I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty.
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The word vegetarian, I think, does a disservice because there are a lot of people who care but maybe don't care, or can't care in an ultimate way. If you think about environmentalism, nobody would ask, Are you an environmentalist or not? The question doesn't make any sense.
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I'm not better than anyone, and I'm not trying to convince people to live by my standards of what's right. I'm trying to convince them to live by their own.
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I want an infinitely blank book and the rest of time.
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I didn't intend to write about totems or people searching. I tried not to constrain myself, and this is what I ended up with. There's this great Auden quote: I look at what I write so I can see what I think.
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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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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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How beautiful is forgetting! What relief it would be for the world to lose some of its contents.
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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?
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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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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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Instead of singing in the shower, I would write out the lyrics of my favourite songs, the ink would turn the water blue or red or green, and the music would run down my legs.
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As long as I am thinking, I am alive.
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I see myself as someone who makes things. Definitions have never done anything but constrain.
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Why does watching a dog be a dog fill one with happiness?
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I saw Herschel and he saw me and we stood next to each other because that is what friends do in the presence of evil or love.
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What's so horrible about being dead forever, and not feeling anything, and not even dreaming? What's so great about feeling and dreaming?
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