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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

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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.
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I got tired, I told him. Not worn out, but worn through. Like one of those wives who wakes up one morning and says I can't bake any more bread.
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...he enclosed pieces of string that he used to measure out his body--his head, thigh, forearm, finger, neck, everything. He wanted me to sleep with them under my pillow. He said that when he came back, we would remeasure his body against the string as proof that he hadn't changed.
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Be the instrument playing the sound of your life's passing
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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.
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One day you will do things for me that you hate. That is what it means to be family.
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It was one of the best days of my life, a day during which I lived my life and didn't think about my life at all.
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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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I felt suddenly shy. I was not used to shy. I was used to shame. Shyness is when you turn your head away from something you want. Shame is when you turn your head away from something you do not want.
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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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Time was passing like a hand waving from a train that I wanted to be on.
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If we communicated with something like music, we would never be misunderstood, because there is nothing in music to understand.
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I said, 'I need to know how he died.' He flipped back and pointed at, 'Why?' So I can stop inventing how he died. I'm always inventing.
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Factory farming, of course, does not cause all the world's problems, but is is remarkable just how many of them intersect there.
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The dissolution of a family, global crisis creates the massive fracture, not only in the Middle East but between America and Israel, between Europe and Israel, between American Jews and Israeli Jews. The distances seem to be widening wherever you look.
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Why do I write? It's not that I want people to think I am smart, or even that I am a good writer. I write because I want to end my loneliness.
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Do you eat chicken because you are familiar with the scientific literature on them and have decided that their suffering doesn't matter, or do you do it because it tastes good?
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Sadness of not knowing enough words to [express what you mean].
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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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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.
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