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6b7c272
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Without context, we'd all be monsters.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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b9615dc
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Sometimes I wonder if she knows, I wonder in my Nothingest moments if she's testing me, if she types nonsense all day long, or types nothing at all, just to see what I'll do in response, she wants to know if I love her, that's all anyone wants from anyone else, not love itself but the knowledge that love is there, like new batteries in the flashlight in the emergency kit in the hall closet.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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9098c06
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Find a printer paper and imagine a full-grown bird shaped something like a football with legs standing on it. Imagine 33,000 of these rectangles in a grid. (Broilers are never in cages, and never on multiple levels.) Now enclose the grid with windowless walls and put a ceiling on top. Run in automated (drug-laced) feed, water, heating, and ventilation systems. This is a farm.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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b73eb36
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If it had and answer, it wouldn't really be love, would it?
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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e0a0583
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When I was old enough to take baths in the bathtub, and to know I had a penis and a scrotum and everything, I asked her not to sit in the room with me. "Why not?" "Privacy." "Privacy from what? From me?" I didn't want to hurt her feelings, because not hurting her feelings is another of my raisons d'etre. "Just privacy," I said...She agreed to wait outside, but only if I held a ball of yarn, which went under the bathroom door and was connect..
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jonathan safran foer |
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2e3e05b
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It can be challenge enough to have to eat with myself.
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food-safety
non-fiction
vegetarianism
food
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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2131b68
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Because it was starting to get dark, and because the streets were crowded, I bumped into a googolplex people. Who were they? Where were they going? What were they looking for? I wanted to hear their heartbeats, and I wanted them to hear mine.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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66bb733
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I hit the spacebar again and again and again. My life story was spaces.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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17b5ea2
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She saw through the shell of me into the center of me
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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f2f1d37
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We aren't exactly emptying the oceans; it's more like clear-cutting a forest with thousands of species to create massive fields with one type of soybean.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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8e3c25d
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There is no dead matter," he taught us, "lifelessness is only a disguise" his voice sank pressed against the wall, "We have lived for too long. We wish. We wish; we want, we want we want We are not," he said, "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."
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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374ac27
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Flea-Market vendors are frozen mid-haggle. Middle-aged women are frozen in the middle of their lives. The gavels of frozen judges are frozen between guilt and innocence. On the ground are the crystals of the frozen first breaths of babies, and those of the last gasps of the dying.
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sixth-borough
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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6f181ce
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We are breeding creatures incapable of surviving in any place other than the most artificial settings. We have focused the awesome power of modern genetic knowledge to bring into being animals that suffer more.
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suffering
humanism
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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03b15f7
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Was his death an essential stage in the continuation of his life?
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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98a7e18
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God loves the plagiarist. And so it is written, 'God created humankind in His image, in the image of God He created them." God is the original plagiarizer. With a lack of reasonable sources from which to filch - man created in the image of what? the animals? - the creation of man was an act of reflexive plagiarizing; God looted the mirror. When we plagiarize, we are likewise creating in the image and participating in the completion of Creat..
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writing
jonathan-safran-foer
plagiarism
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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319be5c
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I believed him. I was not stupid. I was his wife.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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260267a
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I have been waiting for you for so long." I pointed to the car. "We are searching for Trachimbrod." "Oh," she said and she released a river of tears. "You are here. I am it." --
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jonathan-safran-foer
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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14533ed
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All happy mornings resemble one another, as do all unhappy mornings, and that's at the bottom of what makes them so deeply unhappy: the feeling that this unhappiness has happened before, that efforts to avoid it will at best reinforce it, and probably even exacerbate it, that the universe is, for whatever inconceivable, unnecessary, and unjust reason, conspiring against the innocent sequence of clothes, breakfast, teeth and egregious cowlic..
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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d414ab9
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Cruelty...prefers abstraction. Some have tried to resolved this gap by hunting or butchering an animal themselves, as if those experiences might somehow legitimize the endeavor of eating animals. This is very silly. Murdering someone would surely prove that you are capable of killing, but it woudln't be the most reasonable way to understand why you should or shouldn't do it.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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a4fb296
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No baby knows when the nipple is pulled from his mouth for the last time. No child knows when he last calls his mother "Mama." No small boy knows when the book has closed on the last bedtime story that will ever be read to him. No boy knows when the water drains from the last bath he will ever take with his brother. No young man knows, as he first feels his greatest pleasure, that he will never again not be sexual. No brinking woman knows, ..
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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0473522
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Before they had kids, if asked to conjure images of parenthood they would have said things like "Reading in bed," and "Giving a bath," and "Running while holding the seat of a bicycle." Parenthood contains such moments of warmth and intimacy, but isn't them. It's cleaning up. The great bulk of family life involves no exchange of love, and no meaning, only fulfillment. Not the fulfillment of feeling fulfilled, but of fulfilling that which no..
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meaning
parenthood
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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fa23458
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You have to do something bad to do something good.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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6a6fdf5
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Suddenly Yankel was overcome with a fear of dying, stronger than he felt when his parents passed of natural causes, stronger than when his only brother was killed in the flour mill or when his children died, stronger even than when he was a child and it first occurred to him that he must try to understand what it could mean not to be alive -- to be not in darkness, not in unfeeling -- to be not being, not to be.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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82cf365
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Nine out of ten significant people have to do with money or war!
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war
people
truth
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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248e979
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He was responsible. He was good. It's easy to be emotional. You can always make a scene. 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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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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58b1c10
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Maybe I'll try to be more patient with morons.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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f7aa497
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I wouldn't want a boy to think I was pretty unless he was the kind of boy who thought I was pretty.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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fda36f2
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I said I kicked a French chicken in the stomach once." "Huh?" "It said, 'Oeuf.'" "What is that?" "It's a joke. Do you want to hear another, or have you already had un oeuf?"
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joke
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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1830de8
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I did not need to know if he could love me. I needed to know if he could need me.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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c00faac
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Let's go to bed. Those four words differentiate a marriage from every other kind of relationship. We aren't going to find a way to agree, but let's go to bed. Not because we want to, but because we have to. We hate each other right now, but let's go to bed. It's the only one we have. Let's go to our sides, but the sides of the same bed. Let's retreat into ourselves, but together. How many conversations had ended with those four words? How m..
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marriage
love
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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08a6bbc
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I pull the skull off my head. Even though it's made of papier-mache it's really hard. I smash it against Jimmy Snyder's head, and I smash it again. He falls to the ground, because he is unconscious, and I can't believe how strong I actually am. I smash his head again with all my force and blood starts to come out of his nose and ears. But I still don't feel any sympathy for him. I want him to bleed, because he deserves it. And nothing else ..
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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d4d9f87
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You do not have to utter anything you do not want to utter," I told her, and she said, "Then I would never utter another word again." "You do not have to do anything that you do not want to do." "Then I would never do anything again."
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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63519d0
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I am willing to be annoying if that's what was necessary.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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3887a38
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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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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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1e4f011
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I ran rather than walked, anxious to lose my way. All I wanted was to be unsure.
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uncertainty
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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3ab9553
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It hurts me when you do not want to hurt me.
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love
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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4c15d35
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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.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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961d52c
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How did she end up here, like this? How could there have been so much - so many moments, so many people and things, so many razors and pillows, timepieces and subtle coffins - without her being aware? How did her life live itself without her?
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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a83e087
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In my dream, people apologized for things that were about to happen, and lit candles by inhaling.
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sorrow
remorse
regret
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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e1204e4
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I remember spending an afternoon with Mr. Richter in the Central Park Zoo, I went weighted down with food for the animals, only someone who'd never been an animal would put up a sign saying not to feed them, Mr. Richter told a joke, I tossed hamburger to the lions, he rattled the cages with his laughter, the animals went to the corners, we laughed and laughed, together and separately, out loud and silently, we were determined to ignore what..
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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b2608ee
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He removed several pages of death certificates, which were picked up by another breeze and sent into the trees. Some would fall with the leaves that September. Some would fall with the trees generations later.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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18cf0b6
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She spent an afternoon staring at their front door. Waiting for someone? Yankel asked. What color is this? He stood very close to the door, letting the end of his nose touch the peephole. He licked the wood and joked, It certainly tastes like red. Yes, it is red, isn't it? Seems so. She buried her head in her hands. But couldn't it be just a bit more red?
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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fd2cccb
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As long as I am thinking, I am alive.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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d29dc14
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Brod discovered 613 sadnesses, each perfectly unique, each a singular emotion, no more similar to any other sadness than to anger, ecstasy, guilt, or frustration. Mirror Sadness. Sadness of Domesticated Birds. Sadness of Being Sad in front of One's Parent. Humor Sadness. Sadness of Love Without Release.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |