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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
Trying
People
Convince
Standards
Anyone
Better
Live
Right

More quotes by Jonathan Safran Foer

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I got tired, I told him. Not worn out, but worn through. Like one of those wives who wakes up one morning and says I can't bake any more bread.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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You only get to keep what you refuse to let go of.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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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?
Jonathan Safran Foer
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And here I am, instead of there. I'm sitting in this library, thousands of miles from my life, writing another letter I know I won't be able to send, no matter how hard I try and how much I want to. How did that boy making love behind that shed become this man writing this letter at this table?
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Sometimes one simply wants to disappear.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Why do beautiful songs make you sad?' 'Because they aren't true.' 'Never?' 'Nothing is beautiful and true.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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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.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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I've never particularly liked bankers.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Every night before putting her to sleep, Yankel counts her ribs, as if one might have disappeared in the course of the day and become the seed and soil for some new companion to steal her away from him.
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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Yesterday I wanted to turn inside out.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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If the thrill of hunting were in the hunt, or even in the marksmanship, a camera would do just as well.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Weeks passed like boats waiting to sail into the starless dawn, we were full of aimless endless darkness.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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You're incredibly beautiful,' I told her, because she was fat, so I thought it would be an especially nice compliment, and also make her like me again, even though I was sexist.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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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.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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She wanted more, more slang, more figures of speech, the bee's knees, the cats pajamas, horse of a different color, dog-tired, she wanted to talk like she was born here, like she never came from anywhere else
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Sadness of not knowing enough words to [express what you mean].
Jonathan Safran Foer
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I watched the sheets breathe when she breathed, like how Dad used to say that trees inhale when people exhale, because I was too young to understand the truth about biological processes.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Highs and lows make you feel that things matter, but they're nothing. So what's something? Being reliable is something. Being good.
Jonathan Safran Foer