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13e6b55
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I've thought myself out of happinessone one million times, but never once into it.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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6d392b8
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Sea horses have complicated routines for courtship, and tend to mate under full moons, making musical sounds while doing so. They live in long-term monogamous partnerships. What is perhaps most unusual, though, is that it is the male sea horse that carries the young for up to six weeks. Males become properly "pregnant," not only carrying, but fertilizing and nourishing the developing eggs with fluid secretions. The image of males giving bir..
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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00f221d
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I flipped back through the pad of paper while I thought about what Stephen Hawking would do next.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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6a7764b
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I know a lot about birds and bees, but I don't know very much about the birds and the bees. Everything I do know I had to teach myself on the Internet, because I don't have anyone to ask. For example, I know that you give someone a blowjob by putting your penis in their mouth.
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sex
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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dc4bc64
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Maybe that's what a person's personality is: the difference between the inside and outside.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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a2096ab
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It is my great hope that our paths, however long and winding, will cross again.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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ef26b02
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A lot of the time I'd get that feeling like I was in the middle of a huge black ocean, or in deep space, but not in the fascinating way. It's just that everything was incredibly far away from me. It was worst at night. I started inventing things, and then I couldn't stop, like beavers, which I know about. People think they cut down trees so they can build dams, but in reality it's because their teeth never stop growing, and if they didn't c..
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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45ff1e9
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Years were passing through the spaces between moments.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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ee64daa
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The philosopher Elaine Scarry has observed that "beauty always takes place in the particular." Cruelty, on the other hand, prefers abstraction."
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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6b29c0e
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My boots were so heavy that I was glad there was a column beneath us. How could such a lonely person have been living so close to me my whole life? If I had known, I would have gone up to keep him company.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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b68c4e6
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I ripped the pages out of the book. I reversed the order, so the last one was first, and the first was last. When I flipped through them, it looked like the man was floating up through the sky. And if I'd had more pictures, he would've flown through a window, back into the building, and the smoke would've poured into the hole that the plane was about to come out of. Dad would've left his messages backward, until the machine was empty, and t..
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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d2e8197
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He Wrote, Are you OK? I told him, My eyes are crummy. He wrote, But are you OK? I told him, That's a very complicated question. He wrote, That's a very simple answer. I asked, Are you OK? He wrote, Some mornings I wake up feeling grateful.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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62a7770
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Scientific studies and government records suggest that virtually all (upwards of 95 percent of) chickens become infected with E. coli (an indicator of fecal contamination) and between 39 and 75 percent of chickens in retail stores are still infected. Around 8 percent of birds become infected with salmonella (down from several years ago, when at least one in four birds was infected, which still occurs on some farms). Seventy to 90 percent ar..
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vegetarianism
health
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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26453f3
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No, I do not like music. (But what she really was trying to say was this: I like music better than anything in the world, after you.)
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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7e40d8e
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This is love, she thought, isn't it? When you notice someone's absence and hate that absence more than anything? More, even, than you love his presence?
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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6518291
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I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others--the only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad. I am not sad. I am not sad. Because his life had unlimited potential for happiness, insofar as it was an empty white room. He would fall asleep with his heart at the foot of his bed, like some domesticated animal that wa..
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sadness
life
love
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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a702034
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There has yet to be a human to survive a span of history without at least one end of the world.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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29e7ea3
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I went to my grandmother, your great-great-grandmother, and asked her to write a letter. She was my mother's mother. Your father's mother's mother's mother. 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 f..
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history
past
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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7ad0299
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I got tired, I told him. Not worn out, but worn through. Like one of those wives who wakes up one morning and says I can't bake any more bread.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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f5d7a0f
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Dear Anna, we will live in a home with no walls, so that everywhere we go will be our home.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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e08c8c0
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How did her life live itself without her.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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26d1b9a
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Succotash my Balzac, dipshiitake.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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4d1d21a
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There are many premium writers, yes? Tolstoy, yes? He wrote , and also , which are both premium books.
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humor
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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0d9f3c3
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Jacob wrestled with God for the blessing. He wrestled with Esau for the blessing. He wrestled with Isaac for the blessing, with Laban for the blessing, and in each case he eventually prevailed. He wrestled because he recognized that the blessings were worth the struggle. He knew that you only get to keep what you refuse to let go of.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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706adcf
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i couldn't speak the language of his feelings
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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00fcc19
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Not to have a choice is also a choice.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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f9bee54
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I felt, that night, on that stage, under that skull, incredibly close to everything in the universe, but also extremely alone.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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324e1ac
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I watched the sheets breathe when she breathed, like how Dad used to say that trees inhale when people exhale, because I was too young to understand the truth about biological processes.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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ac06613
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he was leaving me. I wondered if I should stop him. If I should wrestle him to the ground and force him to love me. I wanted to hold his shoulders down and shout into his face.
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love
leaving
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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a1304c0
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I wasn't trying to invent better and better homes, but to show her that homes didn't matter, we could live in any home, in any city, in any country, in any century, and be happy, as if the world were just what we lived in.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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29cd049
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What does it remember like?
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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d57ae25
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We need much bigger pockets I thought as I lay in my bed counting off the seven minutes that it takes a normal person to fall asleep. 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 borough and for cities a pocket that could hold the universe.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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df739ff
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It's better to lose than to never have had.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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d229f73
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Life was a small negative space cut out of the eternal solidity, and for the first time, it felt precious - not like all of the words that had come to mean nothing, but like the last breath of a drowning victim.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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8ad7ef9
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But the point isn't that I want to know everything about you. It's that I don't want anything about you withheld.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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1a6725c
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Does it break my heart, of course, every moment of every day, into more pieces than my heart was made of...
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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292fa3a
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I realized I was on a something island. 'How did I get here,' I wondered, surrounded by Nothing, "and how can I get back? "
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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b61d76d
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Or perhaps a widow found him and took him in: brought him an easy chair, changed his sweater every morning, shaved his face until the hair stopped growing, took him faithfully to bed with her every night, whispered sweet nothings into what was left of his ear, laughed with him over black coffee, cried with him over yellowing pictures, talked greenly about having kids of her own, began to miss him before she became sick, left him everything ..
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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e657b9a
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It might sound naive to suggest that whether you order a chicken patty or a veggie burger is a profoundly important decision. Then again, it certainly would have sounded fantastic if in the 1950's you were told that where you sat in a restaurant or on a bus could begin to uproot racism.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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f321ec5
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He couldn't bear to live, but he couldn't bear to die. He couldn't bear the thought of he making love to someone else, but neither could he bear the absence of the thought. And as for the note, he couldn't bear to keep it, but he couldn't bear to destroy it either.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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2e0e5b4
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Weeks passed like boats waiting to sail into the starless dawn, we were full of aimless endless darkness.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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101e6b4
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I made up my mind that nothing,, nothing was going to stop me Not even me.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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00b8f24
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In bed that night I invented a special drain that would be underneath every pillow in New York, and would connect to the reservoir. Whenever people cried themselves to sleep, the tears would all go to the same place, and in the morning the weathermen could report if the water level of the Reservoir of Tears had gone up or down, and you could know if New York was in heavy boots. And when something really terrible happened - like a nuclear bo..
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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183a425
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We believed in our grandmother's cooking more fervently than we believed in God.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |