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Cruelty depends on an understanding of cruelty, and the ability to choose against it. Or to choose to ignore it.

Jonathan Safran Foer

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Jonathan Safran Foer
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: February 21
Novelist
Writer
Washington
District of Columbia
Ignore
Cruelty
Depends
Choose
Understanding
Ability

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I see myself as someone who makes things. Definitions have never done anything but constrain.
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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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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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Part of living your life is an awareness of the opportunities that can be missed and an awareness that time moves in one direction.
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Is there really anyone, besides Rudy Giuliani, who prefers the new Times Square?
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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.
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He was someone whom everyone admired and liked but whom nobody knew. He was like a book that you could feel good holding, that you could talk about without ever having read, that you could recommend.
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Oh, I'd say I like a meal as much as anybody. But I find a certain kind of foodiness silly, gluttonous and embarrassing.
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....Worthy would-be worlds of words, whorls of working wonder.
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I looked at everyone and wondered where they came from, and who they missed, and what they were sorry for.
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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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It’s much easier to be cruel than one might think.
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Parents are always more knowledgeable than their children, and children are always smarter than their parents.
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The bruises go away, and so does how you hate, and so does the feeling that everything you receive from life is something you have earned.
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I think it's a greater risk not to write about 9\11. If you're in my position - a New Yorker who felt the event very deeply and a writer who wants to write about things he feels deeply about - I think it's risky to avoid what's right in front of you.
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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.
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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?
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Oskar Schell: If the sun were to explode, you wouldn't even know about it for 8 minutes because thats how long it takes for light to travel to us. For eight minutes the world would still be bright and it would still feel warm. It was a year since my dad died and I could feel my eight minutes with him... were running out.
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We looked at each other until it felt like everything would burst into flames
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The more exposure people have to the realities of factory farming, the more we will see people rejecting it. It's already happening.
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