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

More quotes by Jonathan Safran Foer

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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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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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It can be challenge enough to have to eat with myself.
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It's the tragedy of loving, you can't love anything more than something you miss.
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There has yet to be a human to survive a span of history without at least one end of the world.
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Thanksgiving is the holiday that encompasses all others. All of them, from Martin Luther King Day to Arbor Day to Christmas to Valentine's Day, are in one way or another about being thankful.
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My test for writing is always, is this fun or does it feel like a job? Is it moving me? Or am I just fulfilling my own expectations - or even worse, somebody else's?
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This brings me back to the image of Kafka standing before a fish in the Berlin aquarium, a fish on which his gaze fell in a newly found peace after he decided not to eat animals. Kafka recognized that fish as a member of his invisible family- not as his equal, of course, but as another being that was his concern.
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Something having been done just about everywhere just about always is no kind of justification for doing it now.
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Reality Hunger is more than thought-provoking it's one of the most beautiful books I've read in a long time.
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This is love, she thought, isn't it? When you notice someone's absence and hate that absence more than anything? More, even, than you love his presence?
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Succotash my Balzac, dipshiitake.
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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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If it weren't my life, I wouldn't have believed it.
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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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We shouldn't be intimidated by someone else's idea of perfection if it will prevent us from taking steps we actively want to take.
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It was one of the best days of my life, a day during which I lived my life and didn't think about my life at all.
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I need an office, so I can have a place where I don't write.
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I zipped myself all the way into the sleeping bag of myself, not because I was hurt, and not because I had broken something, but because they were cracking up.
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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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