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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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It would be refreshing to have a politician try to defend guns without any reference to the Second Amendment, but on the merits of guns.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Time was passing like a hand waving from a train that I wanted to be on.
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Everything that's born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they're all on fire, and we're all trapped.
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We all choose things, and we also all choose against things. I want to be the kind of person who chooses for more than chooses against.
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...he enclosed pieces of string that he used to measure out his body--his head, thigh, forearm, finger, neck, everything. He wanted me to sleep with them under my pillow. He said that when he came back, we would remeasure his body against the string as proof that he hadn't changed.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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I'm so afraid of losing something I love that I refuse to love anything
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
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In my family, Father is the world champion at ending conversations.
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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.
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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
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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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My point is that there are a lot of forces, like the media and the general political rhetoric tells us we should have more. That we should do better than our parents and have a bigger house or a better car.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Murdering someone would surely prove that you are capable of killing, but it wouldn't be the most reasonable way to understand why you shouldn't do it.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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I first became a vegetarian when I was nine, in response to an argument made by a radical babysitter. My great change - which lasted a couple of weeks - was based on the very simple instinct that it's wrong to kill animals for food.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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One day you will do things for me that you hate. That is what it means to be family.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Everything else happened - why not the things that could have?
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Maybe I'll try to be more patient with morons.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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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.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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The dissolution of a family, global crisis creates the massive fracture, not only in the Middle East but between America and Israel, between Europe and Israel, between American Jews and Israeli Jews. The distances seem to be widening wherever you look.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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I was more alone than if I had been alone.
Jonathan Safran Foer