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8f568e1
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I was thankful," said my father, "for the make-believe."
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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e9d403f
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Once upon a time there was a person whose life was so good there was no story to tell about it.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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cc631a2
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It's a shame that we have to live, but it's a tragedy that we only have one life
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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3951dfe
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In the case of animal slaughter, to throw your hands in the air is to wrap your fingers around a knife handle.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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f7c9e02
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I wanted to be empty like an overturned pitcher. But I was full like a stone.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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ddfce82
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that's the business model. How quickly can they be made to grow, how tightly can they be packed, how much or little can they eat, how sick can they get without dying. This isn't animal experimentation, where you can imagine some proportionate good at the other end of the suffering. This is what we feel like eating... 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 eas..
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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0a039d2
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I was pretending to be a monster, and I became a monster.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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af005fa
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He talked and talked, his words fell through him, trying to find the floor of his sadness.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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b22c7e6
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There are times when one needs to disappear while in the living room, and sometimes one simply wants to disappear.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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4f94977
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Oskar Schell: My father died at 9-11. After he died I wouldn't go into his room for a year because it was too hard and it made me want to cry. But one day, I put on heavy boots and went in his room anyway. I miss doing taekwondo with him because it always made me laugh. When I went into his closet, where his clothes and stuff were, I reached up to get his old camera. It spun around and dropped about a hundred stairs, and I broke a blue vase..
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oskar-schell
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Eric Roth Jonathan Safran Foer |
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7e0f41d
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It stayed with him, like a part of him, like a birthmark, like a limb, it was on him, in him, him, his hymn: I had to do it for myself.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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22dd267
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She said I could have a seat on the couch if I wanted to, but I told her I didn't believe in leather, so I stood.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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c13719f
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Did she always have something to read in front of her so she wouldn't have to look at anything else?
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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eee0000
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there were so many different ways to die, and I just need to know which was his.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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e9043fb
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My friends are appeased to stay in Odessa for their entire lives. They are appeased to age like their parents, and become parents like their parents. They do not desire anything more than everything they have known. OK, but this is not for me, and it will not be for Little Igor.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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265840b
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What our babysitter said made sense to me, not only because it seemed true, but because it was the extension to food of everything my parents had taught me. We don't hurt family members. We don't hurt friends or strangers. We don't even hurt upholstered furniture. My not having thought to include animals in that list didn't make them the exceptions to it. It just made me a child, ignorant of the world's workings. Until I wasn't. At which po..
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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e1c22b0
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Killing an animals oneself is more often then not a way to forget the problem while pretending to remember. This is perhaps more harmful than ignorance. It is always possible to wake someone from sleep, but there is no amount of noise that will wake someone who is pretending to be asleep."--pg. 102."
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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2d7cb2b
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I just couldn't be dead any longer.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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10f540e
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He had lived in an apartment with books touching the ceilings, and rugs thick enough to hide dice; then in a room and a half with dirt floors; on forest floors, under unconcerned stars; under the floorboards of a Christian who, half a world and three-quarters of a century away, would have a tree planted to commemorate his righteousness; in a hole for so many days his knees would never wholly unbend; among Gypsies and partisans and half-dece..
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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e1cdfdf
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Hold on. Now you're calling Sam a racist?" "I did not say that, Mr. Bloch." "You did. You just did. Julia--" "I don't remember his exact words." "I said, 'Racism has no place here.'" "Racism is what racists express." "Have you ever lied, Mr. Bloch?" Jacob reflexively searched his jacket pocket yet again for his phone. "I assume that, like everyone who has ever lived, you have told a lie. But that doesn't make you a liar."
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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8258df1
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Yes, I cannot dispute that she is crazy. But she is also compassionate.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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393451c
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The UN special envoy on food called it a "crime against humanity" to funnel 100 million tons of grain and corn to ethanol while almost a billion people are starving. So what kind of crime is animal agriculture, which uses 756 million tons of grain and corn per year, much more than enough to adequately feed the 1.4 billion humans who are living in dire poverty? And that 756 million tons doesn't even include the fact that 98 percent of the 22..
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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634a218
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I have an aristocratic smile and like to punch people.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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1215cca
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Isn't it so weird how the number of dead people is increasing, though the earth stays the same size, so that one day there isn't going to be a room to bury anyone anymore?
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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5b53aa2
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I went to my grandmother... and asked her to write a letter. I hardly knew her. I didn't have any interest in knowing her. 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. What kind of letter? my grandmother asked. I told her to write whatever she wanted to write. You want a letter from me? she asked. I told her yes. Oh, God bless you, she said.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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0fa45bb
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You used to write such honest books. Honest and emotionally ambitious. Maybe they weren't finding millions of readers. Maybe they weren't making you rich. But they were making the world rich
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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a08a94c
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Grandfather interrogates me about you every day. He desires to know if you forgive him for the things he told you about the war, and about Herschel. (You could alter it, Jonathan. For him, not for me. Your novel is now verging on the war. It is possible.) He is not a bad person. He is a good person, alive in a bad time. Do you remember when he said this? Everything is the way it is because everything was the way it was. Sometimes I feel en..
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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0a67fb2
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And there was shame in being human: the shame of knowing that twenty of the roughly thirty-five classified species of sea horse worldwide are threatened with extinction because they are killed "unintentionally" in seafood production."
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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77cb8e5
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I like to see people reunited, maybe that's a silly thing, but what can I say, I like to see people run to each other, I like the kissing and the crying, I like the impatience, the stories that the mouth can't tell fast enough, the ears that aren't big enough, the eyes that can't take in all of the change, I like the hugging, the bringing together, the end of missing someone
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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1e5130a
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When we found each other, I was very flabbergasted by his appearance. This is an American? I thought. And also, This is a Jew? He was severely short. He wore spectacles and had diminutive hairs which were not split anywhere, but rested on his head like a Shapka. (If i were like Father, I might even have dubbed him Shapka.) He did not appear like either the Americans I had witnessed in magazines, with yellow hairs and muscles, or the Jews fr..
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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95b1603
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if we are to be such nomads with the truth, why do we not make the story more premium than life? It seems to me that we are making the story even inferior. We often make ourselves appear as though we are foolish people, and we make our voyage, which was an ennobled voyage, appear very normal and second rate. We could give your grandfather two arms, and could make him high-fidelity. We could give Brod what she deserves in the stead of what s..
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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f6abec1
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desperately knocking against the blind little world, i loosened one of its planks, opening a window to a new, wider world. There, spread out, was a profusion of geography, of atmosphere, of full empty air.
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pages-68-69
poetic
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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929bf26
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We're here, the glow of 1804 will say in one and a half centuries. We're here, and we're alive.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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0f85ff5
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She took the posters downtown that afternoon. She filled a rolling suitcase with them ... she took a stapler. And a box of staples. And hope. I think of those things. The paper, the stapler, the staples, the tape, the hope. It makes me sick. Physical things. Forty years of loving someone becomes staples and hop.
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grief
hope
loss
stapler
staples
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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71fb616
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Oskar. The night before I lost everything was like any other night. Anna and I kept each other awake very late. We laughed. Young sisters in bed under the roof of their childhood home. Wind on the window. How could anything less deserve to be destroyed? I thought we would be awake all night. Awake for the rest of our lives. The spaces between our words grew. It became difficult to tell when we were talking and when we were silent. The hairs..
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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e9be794
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It was not the Jew, of course, who invented the love poem, but the other way around.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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a334c72
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I have witnessed Grandfather cry, and I implore myself to say that I desire to never witness him cry again. If this signifies that I must do things for him so that he will not cry, then I will do those things. If this signifies that I must not look when he cries, then I will not look.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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9216f72
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He would wake from sleep to miss the weight that never depress 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 remembrances that much more convincing and the pain that much more real.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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bab95a5
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My mind wandered to all those years of school portraits: the licked palms wrestling cowlicks under the pretense of a loving stroke; letting the boys watch a cartoon while sliding them into handsome, uncomfortable clothes; clumsy efforts to subliminally communicate the value of a "natural" smile. The pictures always came out the same: a forced grin with unparted lips, eyes vacantly gazing into the haze--something from the Diane Arbus scrap p..
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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4685f95
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I pointed at, Something. He pointed at, Nothing. I pointed at, Something. Nobody pointed at, I love you. There was no way around it. We could not climb over it, or walk until we found its edge. I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live, Oskar. Because if I were able to live my life again, I would do things differently. I would change my life. I would kiss my piano teacher, even if he laughed at me.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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e57209c
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I put my hands into the pockets of all his jackets
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pockets
things-that-i-do
touch
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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58ddb03
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We need enormous pockets, pockets big enough for our families, and our friends, and even the people who aren't on our lists, people we've never met but still want to protect. We need pockets for boroughs and for cities, a pocket that could hold the universe. But I knew 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 every..
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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0743f07
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No one fired a pistol to mark the start of the race to the bottom. The earth just tilted and everyone slid into the hole.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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01c40de
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One weird thing is, I wonder if everyone's hearts would start to beat at the same time, like how women who live together have their menstrual periods at the same time, which I know about, but don't really want to know about.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |