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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
Choose
Understanding
Ability
Ignore
Cruelty
Depends

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Everyone performs bad actions... A bad person is someone who does not lament his bad actions.
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I'm deeply curious about Jewish things. I've toyed around with the idea of going to rabbinical school.
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I shook my tambourine the whole time, because it helped me remember that even though I was going through different neighborhoods, I was still me.
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I did not need to know if he could love me. I needed to know if he could need me.
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The writing itself is no big deal. The editing, and even more than that, the self-doubt, is excruciatingly impossible.
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There's nothing wrong with not understanding yourself.
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I am willing to be annoying if that's what was necessary.
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Dear Anna, we will live in a home with no walls, so that everywhere we go will be our home.
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It’s a rule that we never listen to sad music, we made that rule early on, songs are as sad as the listener, we hardly ever listen to music.
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Flea-Market vendors are frozen mid-haggle. Middle-aged women are frozen in the middle of their lives. The gavels of frozen judges are frozen between guilt and innocence. On the ground are the crystals of the frozen first breaths of babies, and those of the last gasps of the dying.
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In my family, Father is the world champion at ending conversations.
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I see myself as someone who makes things. Definitions have never done anything but constrain.
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Everything is the way it is because everything was the way it was
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There is nothing wrong with compromising. Even if you compromise almost everything.
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We believed in our grandmother’s cooking more fervently than we believed in God.
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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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Only humans can cry tears.
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Whether we're talking about fish species, pigs, or some other eaten animal, is such suffering the most important thing in the world? Obviously not. But that's not the question. Is it more important that sushi, bacon, or chicken nuggets? That's the question.
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Why are you leaving me? He wrote, I do not know how to live. I do not know either but I am trying. I do not know how to try. There were some things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him. So i buried them and let them hurt me
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Everything else happened - why not the things that could have?
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