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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.

Jonathan Safran Foer

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Jonathan Safran Foer
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: February 21
Novelist
Writer
Washington
District of Columbia
Live
Right
Trying
People
Convince
Standards
Anyone
Better

More quotes by Jonathan Safran Foer

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One hundred years of joy can be erased in one second
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Can’t you even tell me if I’m on the right track? Buckminster purred, and Dad shrugged his shoulders again. But if you don’t tell me anything, how can I ever be right? He circled something in an article and said, Another way of looking at it would be, how could you ever be wrong?
Jonathan Safran Foer
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I realized that your mother couldn't see the emptiness, she couldn't see anything...All of the words I'd written to her over all of those years, had I never said anything to hear at all?
Jonathan Safran Foer
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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.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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In the water I saw my father's face, and that face saw the face of its father, and so on, and so on, reflecting backward to the beginning of time, to the face of God, in whose image we were created.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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If people thought about food more like how we think about the environment, a lot of people would be eating differently and the whole system would look a lot different.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Everything is the way it is because everything was the way it was
Jonathan Safran Foer
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It’s much easier to be cruel than one might think.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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She brushed her eyelashes against his chest.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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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.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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She laughed enough to migrate an entire flock of birds. That was how she said yes
Jonathan Safran Foer
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It was terrible. All of the things we couldn't share. The room was filled with conversations we weren't having.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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As a writer, putting words on the page is how I pay attention.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Words are capable of making experience more vivid, and also of organizing it. They can scare us, and they can comfort us.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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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.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Everything is to protect you. I exist in case you need to be protected.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Everything is the way it is because everything was the way it was. Sometimes I feel ensnared in this, as if no matter what I do, what will come has already been fixed.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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There are two kinds of sculptures. There's the kind that subtracts: Michelangelo starts with a block of marble and chips away. And then there is the kind that adds, building with clay, piling it on. The way I write novels is to keep piling on and piling on and piling on.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Be the instrument playing the sound of your life's passing
Jonathan Safran Foer
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What is suffering? I'm not sure what it is, but I know that suffering is the name we give to the origin of all the sighs, screams, and groans — small and large, crude and multifaceted — that concern us. The word defines our gaze even more than what we are looking at.
Jonathan Safran Foer