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5ec5e35
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people with nothing to declare carry the most.
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carry
life
nothing
struggles
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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04afb04
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Because sometimes people who seem good end up being not as good as you might have hoped.
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false-hope
good
people
truth
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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e3f09ed
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They say that people who live next to waterfalls don't hear the water. It was terrible at first. We couldn't stand to be in the house for more than a few hours at a time. The first two weeks were filled with nights of intermittent sleep and quarreling for the sake of being heard over the water. We fought so much just to remind ourselves that we were in love, and not in hate. But the next weeks were a little better. It was possible to sleep ..
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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05ff5ac
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I think it's very pretty. Can it be pretty if no one thinks it's pretty? I think it's pretty. If you're the only one? That's pretty pretty. And what about the boys? Don't you want them to think you're pretty? 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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e51b980
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When I heard your organization was recording testimonies, I knew I had to come. She died in my arms, saying 'I don't want to die.' That is what death is like. It doesn't matter what uniforms the soldiers are wearing. It doesn't matter how good the weapons are. I thought if everyone could see what I saw, we would never have war anymore.
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war
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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f9e4ec0
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She was extending a hand that I didn't know how to take, so I broke its fingers with my silence, she said, "You don't want to talk to me, do you?" I took my daybook out of my knapsack and found the next blank page, the second to last. "I don't speak," I wrote. "I'm sorry." She looked at the piece of paper, then at me, then back at the piece of paper, she covered her eyes with her hands and cried, tears seeped between her fingers, she cried ..
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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e28a338
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She had been in love so many times that she began to suspect she was not falling in love, but rather doing something much more ordinary
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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49ae1db
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We were trying to make our lives easier, trying, with all our rules, to make life effortless. But a friction began to arise between Nothing and Something, in the morning the Nothing vase cast a Something shadow, like the memory of someone you've lost, what can you say about that, at night the Nothing light spilled from the guest room spilled under the Nothing door and stained the Something hallway, there's nothing to say.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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411c223
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I looked at everyone and wondered where they came from, and who they missed, and what they were sorry for.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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5a21e50
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If we are not given the option to live without violence, we are given the choice to center our meals around harvest or slaughter, husbandry or war. We have chosen slaughter. We have chosen war. That's the truest version of our story of eating animals. Can we tell a new story?
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cruelty
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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846b7bb
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Needless to say, jamming deformed, drugged, overstressed birds together in a filthy, waste-coated room is not very healthy. Beyond deformities, eye damage, blindness, bacterial infections of bones, slipped vertebrae, paralysis, internal bleeding, anemia, slipped tendons, twisted lower legs and necks, respiratory diseases, and weakened immune systems are frequent and long-standing problems on factory farms.
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factory-farming
meat
science
veganism
vegetarianism
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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277095a
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There is nothing wrong with compromising. Even if you compromise almost everything.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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00bddd0
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If we were to one day encounter a form of life more powerful and intelligent than our own, and it regarded us as we regard fish, what would be our argument against being eaten?
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life
thought-provoking
inspirational
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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923aecd
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I want an infinitely blank book and the rest of time.
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suffering
writing
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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ee70234
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His arm was so thick and strong. I was sure it would protect me for as long as I lived. And it did. Even after I lost him. The memory of his arm wraps around me as his arm used to. Each day has been chained to the previous one. But the weeks have had wings. Why are you leaving me? He wrote, I do not know how to live. I do not know either, but I am trying. I do not know how to try. There were things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they w..
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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5547a3f
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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 mistaken 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 been laid permanently on their backs--metropolises will be seen from space. They will glow all year. Smaller cit..
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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ae9f16f
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He ran the back of his hand up her cheek, with the pretense of wiping away sweat.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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56f72c6
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Humans are the only animals that have children on purpose, keep in touch (or don't), care about birthdays, waste and lose time, brush their teeth, feel nostalgia, scrub stains, have religions and political parties and laws, wear keepsakes, apologize years after an offense, whisper, fear themselves, interpret dreams, hide their genitalia, shave, bury time capsules, and can choose not to eat something for reasons of conscience. The justificat..
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ethics
humans
vegetarianism
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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e1e3216
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It was the first time I had ever made love. I wondered if he knew that. It felt like crying. I wondered, Why does anyone ever make love?
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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6d31571
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I loved having a dad who was smarter than the , and I loved how my cheek could feel the hairs on his chest through his T-shirt, and how he always smelled like shaving, even at the end of the day. Being with him made my brain quiet. I didn't have to invent a thing.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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c48274c
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Ironically, the utterly unselective omnivore -- "I'm easy; I'll eat anything" -- can appear more socially sensitive than the individual who tries to eat in a way that is good for society."
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vegetarianism
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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8059007
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I wasn't having second thoughts, but I was having thoughts.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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f5d4713
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I used to think that humor was the only way to appreciate how wonderful and terrible the world is, to celebrate how big life is. But now I think the opposite. Humor is a way of shrinking from that wonderful and terrible world.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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28c55ec
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I try not to remember the life that I didn't want to lose but lost and have to remember
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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4cc79fe
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What about a teakettle? What if the spout opened and closed when the steam came out, so it would become a mouth, and it could whistle pretty melodies, or do Shakespeare, or just crack up with me? I could invent a teakettle that reads in Dad's voice, so I could fall asleep, or maybe a set of kettles that sings the chorus of "Yellow Submarine," which is a song by the Beatles, who I love, because entomology is one of my raisons d'etre, which
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sounds
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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7830015
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sometimes you have to put your fears in order...
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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4f9e58a
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JEWS HAVE SIX SENSES Touch, taste, sight, smell, hearing ... memory. While Gentiles experience and process the world through the traditional senses, and use memory only as a second-order means of interpreting events, for Jews memory is no less primary than the prick of a pin, or its silver glimmer, or the taste of the blood it pulls from the finger. The Jew is pricked by a pin and remembers other pins. It is only by tracing the pinprick bac..
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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b56b238
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It's always possible to wake someone from sleep, but no amount of noise will wake someone who is pretending to be asleep.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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de752cf
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It was getting hard to keep all the things I didn't know inside me.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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f9e792c
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In sickness and in sickness. That is what I wish for you. Don't seek or expect miracles. There are no miracles. Not anymore. And there are no cures for the hurt that hurts most. There is only the medicine of believing each other's pain, and being present for it.
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mothers
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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7772189
|
Please be truthful, but also please be benevolent, please.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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ca945bd
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Love itself became the object of her love. She loved herself in love, she loved loving love, as love loves loving, and was able, in that way, to reconcile herself with a world that fell so short of what she would have hoped for.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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87314ca
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Something having been done just about everywhere just about always is no kind of justification for doing it now.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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7a4339a
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If I'd been someone 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.
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world
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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2ea3bf7
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If it weren't my life, I wouldn't have believed it.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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9d58343
|
But it was unnecessary. There would be other nights. And how can you say I love you to someone you love? I rolled on my side and fell asleep next to her. Here is the point of everything I've been trying to tell you, Oskar. It's always necessary. I love you, Grandma
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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f1954c4
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Everything that's born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they're all on fire, and we're all trapped.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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c10f2be
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She wrote, I wish I could be a girl again, with a 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.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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8ba56ed
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I'd lost count of the disappointments.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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ebc28b5
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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?
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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ceb61e7
|
What if the water that came out of the shower was treated with a chemical that responded to a combination of things, like your heartbeat and your body temperature and your brainwaves, so that your skin changed color according to mood? If you were extremely excited your skin would turn green, and if you we're angry you'd turn red, obviously, and if you felt like shiitake you'd turn brown and if you we're blue you'd turn blue. Everyone could ..
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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a127145
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I said, 'I need to know how he died.' He flipped back and pointed at, 'Why?' So I can stop inventing how he died. I'm always inventing.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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1acdf75
|
What about a device that knew everyone you knew? So when an ambulance went down the street, a big sign on the roof could flash DON'T WORRY! DON'T WORRY! if the sick person's device didn't detect the device of someone he knew nearby. And if the device did detect the device of someone he knew, the ambulance could flash the name of the person in the ambulance, and either IT'S NOTHING MAJOR! IT'S NOTHING MAJOR! Or, if it was something major, IT..
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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f1b641a
|
It made me start to wonder if there were other people so lonely so close. I thought about "Eleanor Rigby." It's true, where do they all come from? And where do they all belong?"
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loneliness
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Jonathan Safran Foer |