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Jonathan Safran Foer

Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

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Famous Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

“The disgraced Usurer Yankel D took the baby girl home that evening... He made a bed of crumpled newspaper in a deep baking pan and gently tucked it in the oven, so that she wouldn't be disturbed by the noise of the small falls outside... When he pulled her out to feed her or just hold her, her body was tattooed with the newsprint... Sometimes he would rock her to sleep in his arms, and read her left to right, and know everything he needed to know about the world. If it wasn't written on her, it wasn't important to him.”

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Author:Jonathan Safran Foer
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“I felt, that night, on that stage, under that skull, incredibly close to everything in the universe, but also extremely alone. I wondered, for the first time in my life, if life was worth all the work it took to live. What exactly made it worth it? What's so horrible about being dead forever, and not feeling anything, and not even dreaming? What's so great about feeling and dreaming?”

IfsFirstsMadeFeelingsDreamNightUniverseFeltForeverStageFirst TimeHorribleMade ItLoudWorking ItWorth ItSkulls
Book:Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
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“ART Art is that thing having to do only with itself—the product of a successful attempt to make a work of art. Unfortunately, there are no expamples of art, nor good reasons to think that it will ever exist. (Everything that has been made has been made with a purpose, teverything with an end exists outside of that thing, i.e., "I want to sell this", or "I want this to make me famous and loved", or "I want this to make me whole", or worse, "I want this to make others whole.") And yet we continue to write, paint, sculpt and compose. Is this foolish of us?”

ThinkingWantWritingHas BeensArtMadeEndsReasonWholePurposeSuccessfulProductsArt IsSellsPaintFoolishWorks Of Art
Author:Jonathan Safran Foer
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“From space, astronauts can see people making love as a tiny speck of light. Not light, exactly, but a glow that could be confused for light - a coital radiance that takes generations to pour like honey through the darkness to the astronaut's eyes. In about one and a half centuries - after the lovers who made the glow will have long since been laid permanently on their backs - the metropolitan cities will be seen from space. They will glow all year. Smaller cities will also be seen, but with great difficulty. Towns will be virtually impossible to spot. Individual couples invisible.”

PeopleYearsLongMadeLightEyeIndividualSpaceCitiesHalfDarknessImpossibleGenerationsCenturyCoupleLoversDifficultyTownsTinyInvisibleSpotsConfusedHoneyMaking LoveAstronautRadianceSpecksHalf A CenturyMetropolitan
Book:Everything Is Illuminated
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“When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calendar that showed the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did. Where the smoke from a chimney ended. How an overturned bottle rested at the edge of a table. I spent my life learning to feel less. Every day I felt less. Is that growing old? Or is it something worse? You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.”

FeelsMadeGirlFeltGrowingSadnessDogMonthsProtectTablesMovedEdgesFollowingStrangerSmokeOver ItBottlesCriedGrowing OldCalendarsChimneysLife LearningProtect YourselfWhere You Grew Up
Book:Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
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“But when, at the end of my sophomore year, I became a philosophy major and started doing my first seriously pretentious thinking, I became a vegetarian again. The kind of willful forgetting that I was sure meat eating required felt too paradoxical to the intellectual life I was trying to shape. I thought life could, should, and must conform to the mold of reason. You can imagine how annoying this made me.”

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Author:Jonathan Safran Foer
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“I would have done anything for him. Maybe that was my sickness. We made love in nothing places and turned the lights off. It felt like crying. We could not look at each other. It always had to be from behind. Like that first time. And I knew he wasn't thinking of me. He squeezed my sides so hard, and pushed so hard. Like he was trying to push me through to somewhere else. Why does anyone ever make love?”

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Author:Jonathan Safran Foer
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“I wanted to tell her everything, maybe if I'd been able to, we could have lived differently, maybe I'd be there with you now instead of here. Maybe... if I'd said, 'I'm so afraid of losing something I love that I refuse to love anything,' maybe that would have made the impossible possible. Maybe, but I couldn't do it, I had buried too much too deeply inside me. And here I am, instead of there.”

IfsMadeSaidAbleWantedToo MuchImpossibleLosingRefuseBuriedHere I Am
Book:Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
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“What the meat industry figured out is that you don't need healthy animals to make a profit. Sick animals are more profitable... Factory farms calculate how close to death they can keep animals without killing them. That's the business model. How quickly they can be made to grow, how tightly they can be packed, how much or how little can they eat, how sick they can get without dying...We live in a world in which it's conventional to treat an animal like a block of wood.”

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Author:Jonathan Safran Foer
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“Mom said, "His spirit is there," and that made me really angry. I told her, "Dad didn't have a spirit! He had cells!" "His memory is there." "His memory is here," I said, pointing at my head. "Dad had a spirit," she said, like she was rewinding a bit in our conversation. I told her, "He had cells, and now they're on rooftops, and in the river, and in the lungs of millions of people around New York, who breathe him every time they speak!”

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Book:Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
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“I'm grateful for anything that reminds me of what's possible in this life. Books can do that. Films can do that. Music can do that. School can do that. It's so easy to allow one day to simply follow into the next, but every once in a while we encounter something that shows us that anything is possible, that dramatic change is possible, that something new can be made, that laughter can be shared.”

MadeBookShowsSchoolFilmNextEasyCan DoJourneyOne DayLaughterGratefulThis LifeDramaticEncountersSomething NewAnything Is PossibleDramatic Change
Author:Jonathan Safran Foer
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“It shouldn't be the consumer's responsibility to figure out what's cruel and what's kind, what's environmentally destructive and what's sustainable. Cruel and destructive food products should be illegal. We don't need the option of buying children's toys made with lead paint, or aerosols with chlorofluorocarbons, or medicines with unlabeled side effects. And we don't need the option of buying factory-farmed animals.”

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Author:Jonathan Safran Foer
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“It was inevitable: Yankel fell in love with his never-wife. He would wake from sleep to miss the weight that never depressed the bed next to him, remember in earnest the weight of gestures she never made, long for the un-weight of her un-arm slung over his too-real chest, making his widower's rememberences that much more convincing and his pain that much more real.”

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Book:Everything Is Illuminated
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“We live in a world made up more of story than stuff. We are creatures of memory more than reminders, of love more than likes. Being attentive to the needs of others might not be the point of life, but it is the work of life. It can be messy, and painful, and almost impossibly difficult. But it is not something we give. It is what we get in exchange for having to die.”

WorldNeedsGivingMadeStoriesMightDiesStuffDifficultMemoriesCreaturesPainfulLikesRemindersMessyNeeds Of Others
Author:Jonathan Safran Foer
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