Quote

My test for writing is always, is this fun or does it feel like a job? Is it moving me? Or am I just fulfilling my own expectations - or even worse, somebody else's?

Jonathan Safran Foer

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Jonathan Safran Foer
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: February 21
Novelist
Writer
Washington
District of Columbia
Else
Test
Doe
Tests
Feel
Expectations
Feels
Worse
Writing
Fun
Even
Somebody
Always
Moving
Like
Jobs
Fulfilling

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I wasn’t having second thoughts, but I was having thoughts.
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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.
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Grandfather informs me that is not possible.
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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.
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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.
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The only thing worse than being sad is for others to know you are sad.
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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.
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You only get to keep what you refuse to let go of.
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If we were to one day encounter a form of life more powerful and intelligent than our own, and it regarded us as we regard fish, what would be our argument against being eaten?
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I didn't feel empty. I wished I'd felt empty. ... I wanted to be empty like an overturned pitcher. But I was full like a stone.
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Mom told me, “It probably gets pretty lonely to be Grandma, don’t you think?” I told her, “It probably gets pretty lonely to be anyone
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He promised us that everything would be okay. I was a child, but I knew that everything would not be okay. That did not make my father a liar. It made him my father.
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Sometimes I can feel my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.
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August has passed, and yet summer continues by force to grow days. They sprout secretly between the chapters of the year, covertly included between its pages.
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One day you will do things for me that you hate. That is what it means to be family.
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I would have done anything for him. Maybe that was my sickness.
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One hundred years of joy can be erased in one second
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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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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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Just about every children's book in my local bookstore has an animal for its hero. But then, only a few feet away in the cookbook section, just about every cookbook includes recipes for cooking animals. Is there a more illuminating illustration of our paradoxical relationship with the nonhuman world?
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