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I see myself as someone who makes things. Definitions have never done anything but constrain.

Jonathan Safran Foer

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Jonathan Safran Foer
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: February 21
Novelist
Writer
Washington
District of Columbia
Makes
Someone
Anything
Done
Things
Never
Constrain
Definitions

More quotes by Jonathan Safran Foer

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Most of the times that I think about my relationship to Judaism, I not only accuse myself of a shallowness, but I feel certain that there's a shallowness there. That's not a bad thing, really.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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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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Only humans can cry tears.
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I made up my mind that nothing,, nothing was going to stop me Not even me.
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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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If we are not given the option to live without violence, we are given the choice to center our meals around harvest or slaughter, husbandry or war. We have chosen slaughter. We have chosen war. That's the truest version of our story of eating animals. Can we tell a new story?
Jonathan Safran Foer
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But what she was really trying to say was this: I like music better than anything in the world, after you.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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I want an infinitely blank book and the rest of time.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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I was more alone than if I had been alone.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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I saw Herschel and he saw me and we stood next to each other because that is what friends do in the presence of evil or love.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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I'm sorry for my inability to let unimportant things go, for my inability to hold on to the important things.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Abraham responds Here I am when God asks him to sacrifice his son, and he answers Here I am when his son asks him about what is happening. It's a paradoxical moment. He can't be fully present for his God or his son.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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I am always sad, I think. Perhaps this signifies that I am not sad at all, because sadness is something lower than your normal disposition, and I am always the same thing. Perhaps I am the only person in the world, then, who never becomes sad. Perhaps I am lucky.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Maybe I'll try to be more patient with morons.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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It is not a thing that you can imagine. It only is. After that, there can be no imagining.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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I used to think that humor was the only way to appreciate how wonderful and terrible the world is, to celebrate how big life is. But now I think the opposite. Humor is a way of shrinking from that wonderful and terrible world.
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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I missed you even when I was with you. That’s been my problem. I miss what I already have, and I surround myself with things that are missing.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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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.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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I'm a novelist, I'm not an activist. I'm not a non-fiction writer, I'm not a journalist. I'm not a foodie, I'm not even really an animal person, or an environmentalist. I did the best I could with this, but it's not who I am.
Jonathan Safran Foer