|
88a5817
|
Everyone performs bad actions. I do. Father does. Even you do. A bad person is someone who does not lament his bad actions.
|
|
|
Jonathan Safran Foer |
|
27d304d
|
She was like a drowning person, flailing, reaching for anything that might save her. Her life was an urgent, desperate struggle to justify her life. She learned impossibly difficult songs on her violin, songs outside of what she thought she could know, and would each time come crying to Yankel, I have learned to play this one too! It's so terrible! I must write some- thing that not even I can play! She spent evenings with the art books Yank..
|
|
|
Jonathan Safran Foer |
|
7fcb605
|
Deep down, the young are lonelier than the old.' I read that in a book somewhere and it's stuck in my head. Maybe it's true. Maybe it's not true. More likely, the young and the old are lonely in different ways, in their own ways...
|
|
|
Jonathan Safran Foer |
|
655e2ed
|
Oh,' she said. 'I have never seen a Jew before. Can I see his horns?
|
|
|
Jonathan Safran Foer |
|
be4cbec
|
I have tutored Little Igor to be a man of this world. For example, I exhibited him a smutty magazine three days yore, so that he should be appraised of the many positions in which I am carnal. 'This is sixty-nine,' I told him, presenting the magazine in front of him. I put my fingers--two of them--on the action, so that he would not overlook it. 'Why is it dubbed sixty-nine?' he asked, because he is a person hot on fire with curiosity. 'It ..
|
|
sex
|
Jonathan Safran Foer |
|
d6765c3
|
An ocean could not explain the distance we have traveled.
|
|
philosophical-reflection
|
Jonathan Safran Foer |
|
528cf05
|
The letter was destroyed, but its final paragraph is inside of me. She wrote, I wish I could be a girl again, with the 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. When I was your age, my grandfather gought me a ruby bracelet. It was too big for me and would slide up and down my arm. It was almost a necklace. He later told m..
|
|
|
Jonathan Safran Foer |
|
57d55af
|
If I'd been somone else in a different world I'd've done something different, but I was myself and the world was the world, so I was silent.
|
|
quotes-to-define-my-life
|
Jonathan Safran Foer |
|
50c77a9
|
I wanted to build walls around him, I wanted to separate inside from outside, I wanted to give him an infinitely long blank book and the rest of time.
|
|
|
Jonathan Safran Foer |
|
46a3b8e
|
I wondered, for the first time in my life, if life was worth all the work it took to live.
|
|
|
Jonathan Safran Foer |
|
dfa09c2
|
She would say to him, "But you are no priest." And he would say, "I am today." And she would say, "Today you believe in God?" And he would say, "Today I believe in love."
|
|
|
Jonathan Safran Foer |
|
e6b25b8
|
A Seeing Eye bitch is not only for blind people but for people who pine for the negative of loneliness.
|
|
|
Jonathan Safran Foer |
|
392ad02
|
Given that eating animals is in absolutely no way necessary for my family -- unlike some in the world, we have easy access to a wide variety of other foods -- should we ear animals?
|
|
|
Jonathan Safran Foer |
|
93eadc0
|
She felt as if she were brimming, always producing and hoarding more love inside her. But there was no release.
|
|
|
Jonathan Safran Foer |
|
840d9a7
|
From where she is, the page- her paper-thin future-is infinitely heavy.
|
|
|
Jonathan Safran Foer |
|
4be50bd
|
Death is the only thing in life that you absolutely have to be aware of as it's happening.
|
|
|
Jonathan Safran Foer |
|
adbc265
|
Why is taste, the crudest of our senses, exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other senses? If you stop and think about it, it's crazy. Why doesn't a horny person have as strong a claim to raping an animal as a hungry one does to killing and eating it? It's easy to dismiss that question but hard to respond to it. And how would you judge an artist who mutilated animals in a gallery because it was visually arresting? How riveting w..
|
|
|
Jonathan Safran Foer |
|
421bb8f
|
I can be funny, because I have time to meditate about how to be funny, and I can repair my mistakes when I perform mistakes, and I can be a melancholy person in manners that are interesting, not only melancholy. With writing, we have second chances.
|
|
|
Jonathan Safran Foer |
|
0497b35
|
All that mattered was him looking at me
|
|
love
him
|
Jonathan Safran Foer |
|
a6f9b72
|
When I got off the plane, after eleven hours of travel and forty years away, the man took my passport and asked me the purpose of my visit, I wrote in my daybook, "To mourn," and then, "To mourn try to live," he gave me a look and asked if I would consider that business or pleasure, I wrote, "Neither." "For how long do you plan to mourn and try to live?" "For as long as I can." "Are we talking about a weekend or a year?" I didn't write anyt..
|
|
|
Jonathan Safran Foer |
|
10ae929
|
To try to live.
|
|
|
Jonathan Safran Foer |
|
2b27614
|
Grandfather] would manufacture funnies with Grandmother before she died about how he was in love with other women who were not her. She knew it was only funnies because she would laugh in volumes. 'Anna,' he would say, 'I am going to marry that one with the pink hat.' And she would say, 'To whom are you going to marry her?' And he would say, 'To me.' I would laugh very much in the back seat, and she would say to him, 'But you are no priest...
|
|
|
Jonathan Safran Foer |
|
31a7283
|
Brod's life was a slow realization that the world was not for her, and that for whatever reason, she would never be happy and honest at the same time. She felt as if she were brimming, always producing and hoarding more love inside her. But there was no release. Table, ivory elephant charm, rainbow, onion, hairdo, mollusk, Shabbos, violence, cuticle, melodrama, ditch, honey, doily... None of it moved her. She addressed her world honestly, s..
|
|
jonathan-safran-foer
|
Jonathan Safran Foer |
|
148c14d
|
What's so horrible about being dead forever, and not feeling anything, and not even dreaming? What's so great about feeling and dreaming?
|
|
feeling
life-and-death
|
Jonathan Safran Foer |
|
b615168
|
The only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad.
|
|
|
Jonathan Safran Foer |
|
7a19a77
|
A few days after we came home from the hospital, I sent a letter to a friend, including a photo of my son and some first impressions of fatherhood. He responded, simply, 'Everything is possible again.' It was the perfect thing to write because that was exactly how it felt.
|
|
motherhood
family
love
fatherhood
parenthood
|
Jonathan Safran Foer |
|
2ff4b95
|
I think about all of the things I've done, Oskar. And all of the things I didn't do. The mistakes I've made are dead to me. But I can't take back the things I never did.
|
|
|
Jonathan Safran Foer |
|
4a0935b
|
But I knew that there couldn't be pockets that enormous. In the end, everyone loses everyone. There was no invention to get around that, and so I felt, that night, like the turtle that everything else in the universe was on top of.
|
|
|
Jonathan Safran Foer |
|
2d6165f
|
The moment before he started was my favorite moment.
|
|
|
Jonathan Safran Foer |
|
e0c6b3d
|
Life overflows with imperfections, but some matter more than others
|
|
|
Jonathan Safran Foer |
|
ee7ae9e
|
Fuck You!' [Oskar said] 'Exuse me!' [His mom said] 'Sorry. I mean, screw you.' 'You need a time-out!' 'I need a mausoleum!
|
|
oskar-schell
jonathan-safran-foer
sad
|
Jonathan Safran Foer |
|
e73a7c8
|
I walked into a bakery seven years later and there he was. He had dogs at his feet and a bird in a cage beside him. The seven years were not seven years. They were not seven hundred years. Their length could not be measured in years, just as an ocean could not explain the distance we had traveled, just as the dead can never be counted. I wanted to run away from him, and I wanted to go right up to him.
|
|
|
Jonathan Safran Foer |
|
1411c94
|
I promised myself I wouldn't be the first to look away, but I was.
|
|
|
Jonathan Safran Foer |
|
bf16b12
|
was one of the best days of my life, a day during which I lived my life and didn't think about my life at all.
|
|
|
Jonathan Safran Foer |
|
9267263
|
The dream that we are our fathers. I walked to the Brod, 41 without knowing why, and looked into my reflection in the water. I couldn't look away. What was the image that pulled me in after it? What was it that I loved? And then I recognized it. So simple. In the water I saw my father's face, and that face saw the face of its father, and so on, and so on, reflecting backward to the beginning of time, to the face of God, in whose image we we..
|
|
|
Jonathan Safran Foer |
|
2975610
|
They say that people who live next to waterfalls don't hear the water.
|
|
|
Jonathan Safran Foer |
|
19e8a06
|
Your train ride appeased you?" I asked. "Oh, God," he said, "twenty-six hours, fucking unbelievable." This girl Unbelievable must be very majestic, I thought."
|
|
|
Jonathan Safran Foer |
|
7a4b193
|
And the general shot my sister. I could not look at her, but I remember the sound of when she hit the ground. I hear that sound when things hit the ground still. Anything.' If I could, I would make it so nothing ever hit the ground again.
|
|
|
Jonathan Safran Foer |
|
89921fc
|
We just stood there, facing each other, but nine floors apart.
|
|
|
Jonathan Safran Foer |
|
da54883
|
He invented stories so fantastic she had to believe. Of cours, she was only a child, still removing the dust from her first death. What else could she do? And he was already accumulating the dust of his second death. What else could he do?
|
|
|
Jonathan Safran Foer |
|
71a1d24
|
One can build a perfect home, but not live in it.
|
|
life
|
Jonathan Safran Foer |
|
4acc82a
|
The wanting, the needing, the distance, the disappointment: growing, knowing, committing, aging beside another. Alone, one can live perfectly. But not a life.
|
|
|
Jonathan Safran Foer |
|
d536657
|
Rabbi, I feel no despair anymore. For seventy years I had only nightmares, but I have no nightmares anymore. I feel only gratitude for my life, for every moment I lived. Not only the good moments. I feel gratitude for every moment of my life. I have seen so many miracles.
|
|
|
Jonathan Safran Foer |
|
b7c4b4b
|
In the end, everyone looses everyone. There was no invention to get around that, and so I felt, that night, like the turtle that everything else in the universe was on top of.
|
|
|
Jonathan Safran Foer |