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9b8e1b6
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Her 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 violence melodrama honey...None of it moved her. She addressed the world honestly searching for something deserving of the volumes of love ..
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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54806c7
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I put my hand on the doorknob because I thought maybe her hand was on the doorknob on the other side.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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583e6f1
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She extended a hand that I didn't know how to take, so I broke its fingers with my silence.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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1d48f47
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I like to see people reunited, maybe that's a silly thing, but what an I say, I like to see people run to each other, I like the kissing and they 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, I sit on the side with a coffee and write in my daybook, I examin..
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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496a2b6
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We stopped laughing, I took the world into me, rearranged it, and sent it back out as a question: "Do you like me?"
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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4f21535
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I put my hand on him. Touching him has always been important to me, it was something I lived for. I never could explain why. Little, nothing touches, my fingers against his shoulder, the outsides of our thighs touching as we squeeled together on the bus. I couldnt explain it, but I needed it. Sometimes I imagined stiching all of our little touches together. How many hundreds of thousands of fingers brushing against each other does it take t..
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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c8a3f91
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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 a..
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time
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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7544194
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I read the first chapter of when Dad was still alive, and I got incredibly heavy boots about how relatively insignificant life is, and how, compared to the universe and compared to time, it didn't even matter if I existed at all.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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f9d0f87
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Anyone who believes that a second is faster than a decade did not live life.
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time
live-life
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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ba66123
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But I do not do these things because we are family. I do them because they are common decencies. That is an idiom that the hero taught me. I do them because I am not a big fucking asshole. That is another idiom that the hero taught me.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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3721e3f
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After a time, I had only a handful of words left... Does it break my heart, of course, every moment of every day, into more pieces than my heart was made of, I never thought of myself as quiet, much less silent, I never thought about things at all, everything changed, the distance that wedged itself between me and my happiness wasn't the world, it wasn't the bombs and burning buildings, it was me, my thinking, the cancer of never letting go..
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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9ef2674
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I'm a vegetarian. You're a what? I don't eat meat. How can you not eat meat? I just don't. He says he does not eat meat. What? No meat? No meat. Steak? No... Chickens! No... And what about the sausage? No, no sausage, no meat! He says he does not eat any meat. Not even sausage? I know! What is wrong with him?
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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d9ec968
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I went to the guest room and pretended to write. I hit the space bar again and again and again. My life story was spaces.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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a1c511c
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Also, I designed a pretty fascinating bracelet, where you put a rubber band around your favorite book of poems for a year, and then you take it off and wear it.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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cb000c2
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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, ..
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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d52816b
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The paper, the stapler, the staples, the tape. It makes me sick. Physical things. Forty years of loving someone becomes staples and tape.
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love
tape
staples
stapler
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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534ebf0
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To feel alone is to be alone.
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jonathan-safran-foer
everything-is-illuminated
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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c124332
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I love sushi, I love fried chicken, I love steak. But there is a limit to my love,
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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b997f83
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the meaning of my thoughts started to float away from me, like leaves that fall from a tree into a river, I was the tree, the world was the river.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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9189f2b
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I would have done anything for him. Maybe that was my sickness.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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d977dd2
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It's easy to close, but almost impossible to close. Think about friends. Think about hobbies. Even ideas. They're close to us--sometimes so close we think they are part of us--and then, at some point, they aren't close anymore. They go away. Only one thing can keep something close over time: holding it there. Grappling with it. Wrestling it to the ground, as Jacob did with the angel, and refusing to let go. What we don't wrestle we let ..
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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c23a321
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This is the 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 was invented in 1969. My friend Gregory knows a friend of the nephew of the inventor." "What did people do before 1969?" "Merely blowjobs and masticating box, but never in chorus."
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sex
humorous
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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aecbe1d
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I asked him did he really love New York or was he just wearing the shirt. He smiled, like he was nervous. I could tell he didn't understand, which made me feel guilty for speaking English, for some reason. I pointed at his shirt. "Do? You? Really? Love? New York?" He said, "New York?" I said, "Your. Shirt." He looked at his shirt. I pointed at the N and said "New," and the Y and said "York." He looked confused or embarrassed, or surprised, ..
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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069ac37
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We know, at least, that this decision (ending factory farming) will help prevent deforestation, curb global warming, reduce pollution, save oil reserves, lessen the burden on rural America, decrease human rights abuses, improve publish health, and help eliminate the most systematic animal abuse in history.
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factory-farming
environment
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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79304e8
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And so it was when anyone tried to speak: their minds would become tangled in remembrance. Words became floods of thought with no beginning or end, and would drown the speaker before he could reach the life raft of the point he was trying to make. It was impossible to remember what one meant, what, after all of the words, was intended.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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5bd64fe
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And nothing inspires as much shame as being a parent. Children confront us with our paradoxes and hypocrisies, and we are exposed. You need to find an answer for every why -- Why do we do this? Why don't we do that? -- and often there isn't a good one. So you say, simply, because. Or you tell a story that you know isn't true. And whether or not your face reddens, you blush. The shame of parenthood -- which is a good shame -- is that we want..
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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f26fe04
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I am sure people tell you this constantly but if you looked up 'incredibly beautiful' in the dictionary there would be a picture of you.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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f3d2963
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You do not have to be shamed in my closeness. Family are the people who must never make you feel ashamed.) (You are wrong. Family are the people who must make you feel ashamed when you are deserving of shame.) (And you are deserving of shame?) (I am. I am trying to tell you.) 'We were stupid,' he said, 'because we believed in things.' 'Why is this stupid?' 'Because there are not things to believe in.' (Love?) (There is no love. Only the end..
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family
god
love
shame
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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058f2dc
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Anyway, the fascinating thing was that I read in National Geographic that there are more people alive now than have died in all of human history. In other words, if everyone wanted to play Hamlet at once, they couldn't, because there aren't enough skulls!
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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b89f43a
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Isn't it strange how upset people get about a few dozen baseball players taking growth hormones, when we're doing what were doing to our food animals and feeding them to our children?
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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b9cec77
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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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good
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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02d780f
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This isn't animal experimentation, where you an imagine some proportionate good at the other end of the suffering. This is what we feel like eating. Tell me something: Why is taste, the crudest of our sense, exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other sense? If you stop and think about it, it's crazy. Why doesn't a horny person has as strong a claim to raping an animal as a hungry one does to killing and eating it?
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vegetarianism
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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82bcf11
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We spent our lives making livings.
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work
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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d6707f8
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My insides don't match up with my outsides. -Do anyone's inside and outsides match up? -I don't know. I'm only me. -Maybe that's what a person's personality is: the difference between the inside and the outside.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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0ecff81
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You only get to keep what you refuse to let go of.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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9558cdb
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But I knew the truth and that's why I was so sad. Every moment before this one depends on this one. Everything in the history of the world can be proven wrong in one moment.
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life
paths
moments
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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ebccc9d
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People around the world were moving from one place to another. No one was staying.
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moving
the-world
traveling
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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c8a7aff
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This brings me back to the image of Kafka standing before a fish in the Berlin aquarium, a fish on which his gaze fell in a newly found peace after he decided not to eat animals. Kafka recognized that fish as a member of his invisible family- not as his equal, of course, but as another being that was his concern.
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kafka
veganism
vegetarianism
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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50bf345
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I was of the opinion that the past is past, and like all that is not now it should remain buried along the side of our memories.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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097b637
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How beautiful is forgetting! What relief it would be for the world to lose some of its contents.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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3ab1022
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She was with me. She did all of those things and so many more, things I would never tell anyone, and she never even loved me. Now that's love.
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jonathan-safran-foer
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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e780e71
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Choosing leaf or flesh, factory farm or family farm, does not in itself change the world, but teaching ourselves, our children, our local communities, and our nation to choose conscience over ease can.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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85b9ca1
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What? she said once to herself, and then once aloud, What? She felt a total displacement, like a spinning globe brought to a sudden halt by the light touch of a finger. 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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2fccaee
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We are not 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. We shall have this as our aim: a gesture.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |