Quote

I write because I want to end my loneliness. Books make people less alone. That, before and after everything else, is what books do. They show us that conversations are possible across distances.

Jonathan Safran Foer

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Jonathan Safran Foer
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: February 21
Novelist
Writer
Washington
District of Columbia
Else
Conversation
Ends
Alone
Everything
Books
Book
Possible
Distances
Writing
Less
Conversations
Make
Show
Loneliness
People
Write
Distance
Shows
Across

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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.
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I would have done anything for him. Maybe that was my sickness.
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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.
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Compassion is a muscle that gets stronger with use, and the regular exercise of choosing kindness over cruelty would change us.
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I didn't intend to write about totems or people searching. I tried not to constrain myself, and this is what I ended up with. There's this great Auden quote: I look at what I write so I can see what I think.
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We are not long-term beings. Not heroes of romances in many volumes. For one gesture, for one word alone, we shall make the effort. We openly admit: our creations will be temporary. We shall have this as our aim: a gesture.
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If we communicated with something like music, we would never be misunderstood, because there is nothing in music to understand.
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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.
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The word vegetarian, I think, does a disservice because there are a lot of people who care but maybe don't care, or can't care in an ultimate way. If you think about environmentalism, nobody would ask, Are you an environmentalist or not? The question doesn't make any sense.
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Or maybe what he fears is just the opposite: that nobody is looking that his death, like his life, is without purpose that there is neither greater good nor evil--only people living and dying because their bodies function and then do not that the universe is a rip.
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It was getting hard to keep all the things I didn't know inside me.
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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.
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I have so much to say to you. I want to begin at the beginning, because that is what you deserve. I want to tell you everything, without leaving out a single detail. But where is the beginning? And what is everything?
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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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I'm deeply curious about Jewish things. I've toyed around with the idea of going to rabbinical school.
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It took me as long as I had known him to get rid of all of his words. Like turning an hourglass over.
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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.
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Books are for those without real lives, he thought. And they are no real replacement.
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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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That’s all anyone wants from anyone else, not love itself but the knowledge that love is there.
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