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I always write out of a need to read something, rather than a need to write something.

Jonathan Safran Foer

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Jonathan Safran Foer
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: February 21
Novelist
Writer
Washington
District of Columbia
Writing
Something
Always
Rather
Read
Write
Need
Needs

More quotes by Jonathan Safran Foer

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As a writer, putting words on the page is how I pay attention.
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Weeks passed like boats waiting to sail into the starless dawn, we were full of aimless endless darkness.
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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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Everything else happened - why not the things that could have?
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Factory farming, of course, does not cause all the world's problems, but is is remarkable just how many of them intersect there.
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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?
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We could imagine all sorts of universes unlike this one, but this is the one that happened.
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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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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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None of the ways people were talking about September 11 felt right to me. I don't buy into the way George W. Bush talks about it. I don't buy into the way the 9/11 commission talks about it. It isn't that I don't believe them. It's just that they're not the tellings for me.
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How beautiful is forgetting! What relief it would be for the world to lose some of its contents.
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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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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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I like to see people reunited, I like to see people run to each other, I like the kissing and the crying, I like the impatience, the stories that the mouth can't tell fast enough, the ears that aren't big enough, the eyes that can't take in all of the change, I like the hugging, the bringing together, the end of missing someone.
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In truth I was manufacturing a brick wall of shits.
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As I've grown older, I've grown more convinced there's nothing that shouldn't be talked about. If we think we're protecting each other, we're not.
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?
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Also, I designed a pretty fascinating bracelet, where you put a rubber band around your favorite book of poems for a year, and then you take it off and wear it.
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Is there really anyone, besides Rudy Giuliani, who prefers the new Times Square?
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They reciprocated the great and saving lie--that our love for things is greater than our lover for our love for things--willfully playing the parts they wrote for themselves, willfully creating and believing fictions necessary for life.
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