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You only get to keep what you refuse to let go of.

Jonathan Safran Foer

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Jonathan Safran Foer
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: February 21
Novelist
Writer
Washington
District of Columbia
Refuse
Keep

More quotes by Jonathan Safran Foer

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If people thought about food more like how we think about the environment, a lot of people would be eating differently and the whole system would look a lot different.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Is there really anyone, besides Rudy Giuliani, who prefers the new Times Square?
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Writers now are putting total faith in designers at Apple and Amazon. It's almost like a race-car driver having no input into how cars are designed.
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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.
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I'm not better than anyone, and I'm not trying to convince people to live by my standards of what's right. I'm trying to convince them to live by their own.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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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.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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...because he had been waiting for someone to come back to him, so every time someone knocked on the door, he couldn't stop himself from hoping it might be that person, even though he knew he shouldn't hope.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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I zipped myself all the way into the sleeping bag of myself, not because I was hurt, and not because I had broken something, but because they were cracking up.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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I did not need to know if he could love me. I needed to know if he could need me.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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When it comes to meat, change is almost always cast as an absolute. You are a vegetarian or you are not.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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....Worthy would-be worlds of words, whorls of working wonder.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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[…] but I believe that things are extremely complicated, and her looking over me was as complicated as anything could ever be. But it was also incredibly simple.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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She extended a hand that I didn't know how to take, so I broke its fingers with my silence.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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I often think about how my sons will come to know about September 11th. Something overheard? A newspaper image? In school? I would prefer that they learn about it from my wife and me, in a deliberate and safe way. But it's hard to imagine ever feeling ready to broach the subject without some impetus.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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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.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Succotash my Balzac, dipshiitake.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Everyone performs bad actions... A bad person is someone who does not lament his bad actions.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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I started carrying blank books like this one around, which I would fill with all the things I couldn't say.
Jonathan Safran Foer
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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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So many people enter and leave your life! Hundreds of thousands of people! You have to keep the door open so they can come in! But it also means you have to let them go!
Jonathan Safran Foer