Quote

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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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?
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Just about every children's book in my local bookstore has an animal for its hero. But then, only a few feet away in the cookbook section, just about every cookbook includes recipes for cooking animals. Is there a more illuminating illustration of our paradoxical relationship with the nonhuman world?
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Books are slow, books are quiet. The Internet is fast and loud.
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I am sure people tell you this constantly but if you looked up 'incredibly beautiful' in the dictionary there would be a picture of you.
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Everyone performs bad actions... A bad person is someone who does not lament his bad actions.
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Everything is the way it is because everything was the way it was
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As a writer, putting words on the page is how I pay attention.
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It was getting hard to keep all the things I didn't know inside me.
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The French, who love their dogs, sometimes eat their horses. The Spanish, who love their horses, sometimes eat their cows. The Indians, who love their cows, sometimes eat their dogs.
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Most of the times that I think about my relationship to Judaism, I not only accuse myself of a shallowness, but I feel certain that there's a shallowness there. That's not a bad thing, really.
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Then I have some bad news for you, because humans are going to destroy each other as soon as it becomes easy enough to, which will be very soon.
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It's the tragedy of loving, you can't love anything more than something you miss.
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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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Even if I don't like what I am, I know what I am. My children like what they are, but they don't know what they are. So tell me which is worse.
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The gift is for you...The surprise is for me.
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I wanted so much to have a life. Even just once, even for a second.
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Every factory-farmed animal is, as a practice, treated in ways that would be illegal if it were a dog or a cat.
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The secret was a hole in the middle of me that every happy thing fell into.
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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 hope you never think about anything as much as I think about you.
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