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You have to do something bad to do something good.

Jonathan Safran Foer

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Jonathan Safran Foer
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: February 21
Novelist
Writer
Washington
District of Columbia
Something
Good

More quotes by Jonathan Safran Foer

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Art can be very political but that can't be the purpose of art, it can't be the driving force. It isn't with any of the books that I love, anyway.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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The end of suffering does not justify the suffering, what a mess I am, I thought, what a fool, how foolish and narrow, how worthless, how pinched and pathetic, how helpless.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Why does watching a dog be a dog fill one with happiness?
Jonathan Safran Foer
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There are two kinds of sculptures. There's the kind that subtracts: Michelangelo starts with a block of marble and chips away. And then there is the kind that adds, building with clay, piling it on. The way I write novels is to keep piling on and piling on and piling on.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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I wouldn't want a boy to think I was pretty unless he was the kind of boy who thought I was pretty.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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He removed several pages of death certificates, which were picked up by another breeze and sent into the trees. Some would fall with the leaves that September. Some would fall with the trees generations later.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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I'm sorry for my inability to let unimportant things go, for my inability to hold on to the important things.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Kids are a great analogy. You want your kids to grow up, and you don't want your kids to grow up. You want your kids to become independent of you, but it's also a parent's worst nightmare: That they won't need you. It's like the real tragedy of parenting.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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People who become used to saying little become used to feeling little.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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This is love, she thought, isn't it? When you notice someone's absence and hate that absence more than anything? More, even, than you love his presence?
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Weeks passed like boats waiting to sail into the starless dawn, we were full of aimless endless darkness.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Also, I designed a pretty fascinating bracelet, where you put a rubber band around your favorite book of poems for a year, and then you take it off and wear it.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Shyness is when you turn your head away from something you want.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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She felt as if she were brimming, always producing and hoarding more love inside her. But there was no release.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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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.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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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.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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It made me start to wonder if there were other people so lonely so close. I thought about “Eleanor Rigby.” It’s true, where do they all come from? And where do they all belong?
Jonathan Safran Foer
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I am willing to be annoying if that's what was necessary.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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What were we spending so much time doing if not getting to know each other?
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Eating a piece of meat, at its most efficient, we could say is like throwing away six times that amount of food every time you eat it because you're recycling all those calories through it. I know a lot of people who came to this issue not through animal welfare but through wastefulness.
Jonathan Safran Foer