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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.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Jonathan Safran Foer
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: February 21
Novelist
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Washington
District of Columbia
Writing
Searching
Think
Ended
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People
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Auden
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Totems
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More quotes by Jonathan Safran Foer
My dream went all the way back to the beginning. The rain rose into the clouds, and the animals descended the ramp.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Living on a planet of fixed size requires compromise, and while we are the only party capable of negotiating, we are not the only party at the table. We've never claimed more, and we've never had less.
Jonathan Safran Foer
It was terrible. All of the things we couldn't share. The room was filled with conversations we weren't having.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Raising your kids vegetarian is a great way to encourage them to do the opposite of what you want! But the goal is not to have them have the same values that I have. It's to have them act on their values.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Not responding is a response--we are equally responsible for what we don't do. In the case of animal slaughter, to throw your hands in the air is to wrap your fingers around a knife handle.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Grandfather informs me that is not possible.
Jonathan Safran Foer
I felt suddenly shy. I was not used to shy. I was used to shame. Shyness is when you turn your head away from something you want. Shame is when you turn your head away from something you do not want.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Weeks passed like boats waiting to sail into the starless dawn, we were full of aimless endless darkness.
Jonathan Safran Foer
But what she was really trying to say was this: I like music better than anything in the world, after you.
Jonathan Safran Foer
I need an office, so I can have a place where I don't write.
Jonathan Safran Foer
She wrote, I wish I could be a girl again, with a chance to live my life again. I have suffered so much more than I needed to. And the joys I have felt have not always been joyous. I could have lived differently.
Jonathan Safran Foer
I have no need for the past, I thought, like a child. I did not consider that the past might have a need for me.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Just because you're an atheist, that doesn't mean you wouldn't love for things to have reasons for why they are.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Choosing leaf or flesh, factory farm or family farm, does not in itself change the world, but teaching ourselves, our children, our local communities, and our nation to choose conscience over ease can.
Jonathan Safran Foer
She wanted more, more slang, more figures of speech, the bee's knees, the cats pajamas, horse of a different color, dog-tired, she wanted to talk like she was born here, like she never came from anywhere else
Jonathan Safran Foer
Am I such a bad person for dreaming of a world that ends when I do? I don't mean the world ending with respect to me, but every set of eyes closing with mine.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Well, what I don't get is why do we exist? I don't mean how, but why.' I watched the fireflies of his thoughts orbit his head. He said, 'we exist because we exist. . .we could imagine all sorts of universes like this one, but this is the one that happened.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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
I wouldn't want a boy to think I was pretty unless he was the kind of boy who thought I was pretty.
Jonathan Safran Foer