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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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Jonathan Safran Foer
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: February 21
Novelist
Writer
Washington
District of Columbia
Suffering
Pathetic
Ends
Worthless
Thought
Helpless
Doe
Narrow
Justify
Foolish
Mess
Fool
Pinched

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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It was not the feeling of completeness I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty.
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I see myself as someone who makes things. Definitions have never done anything but constrain.
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Choosing leaf or flesh, factory farm or family farm, does not in itself change the world, but teaching ourselves, our children, our local communities, and our nation to choose conscience over ease can.
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Isn't it strange how upset people get about a few dozen baseball players taking growth hormones, when we're doing what we're doing to our food animals and feeding them to our children?
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Abraham responds Here I am when God asks him to sacrifice his son, and he answers Here I am when his son asks him about what is happening. It's a paradoxical moment. He can't be fully present for his God or his son.
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I think after you live it's like before you lived.
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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?
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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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Why do beautiful songs make you sad?' 'Because they aren't true.' 'Never?' 'Nothing is beautiful and true.
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Why does watching a dog be a dog fill one with happiness?
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Love...is the immovability of truth.
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Am I such a bad person for dreaming of a world that ends when I do? I don't mean the world ending with respect to me, but every set of eyes closing with mine.
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We need a better way to talk about eating animals, a way that doesn't ignore, or even just shruggingly accept things like habits, cravings, family and history, but rather incorporates them into the conversation. The more they are allowed in, the more strongly we will want to follow our best instincts.
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She said, Do you have more things that you need, or more that you don't need? I said, It depends on what it means to need.
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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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I made up my mind that nothing,, nothing was going to stop me Not even me.
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I always write out of a need to read something, rather than a need to write something.
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It was terrible. All of the things we couldn't share. The room was filled with conversations we weren't having.
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