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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
Understanding
Ability
Ignore
Cruelty
Depends
Choose

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We talked about nothing in particular, but it felt like we were talking about the most important things.
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Since the world has changed so much, the same values don't lead to the same choices anymore.
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You can call your turkey organic and torture it daily.
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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 didn't feel empty. I wished I'd felt empty. ... I wanted to be empty like an overturned pitcher. But I was full like a stone.
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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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But come. No explaining or mending. Be beside me somewhere.
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My dream went all the way back to the beginning. The rain rose into the clouds, and the animals descended the ramp.
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I'm so afraid of losing something I love that I refuse to love anything
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We all choose things, and we also all choose against things. I want to be the kind of person who chooses for more than chooses against.
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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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You are the only one who has understood even a whisper of me, and I will tell you that I am the only person who has understood even a whisper of you.
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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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Do you have any coffee?'...'It stunts my growth, and I'm afraid of death.
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My point is that there are a lot of forces, like the media and the general political rhetoric tells us we should have more. That we should do better than our parents and have a bigger house or a better car.
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I wanted to hit him. I wanted to hold him. I wanted to shout myself into his ear.
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She felt as if she were brimming, always producing and hoarding more love inside her. But there was no release.
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And also, there are so many times when you need to make a quick escape, but humans don't have their own wings, or not yet, anyway, so what about a birdseed shirt?
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I'm not better than anyone, and I'm not trying to convince people to live by my standards of what's right. I'm trying to convince them to live by their own.
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