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dffb8db
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We are lying to ourselves and to each other. Lying about what? I don't care if we're lying. I am a bad person. I don't care. I don't care what you are.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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e29aecf
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but I believe that things are extremely complicated, and her looking over me was as complicated as anything could ever be. But it was also incredibly simple.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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76b78f4
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Touch had always saved them in the past. No matter the anger or hurt, no matter the depth of the aloneness, a touch, even a light and passing touch, reminded them of their long togetherness.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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c1a842e
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and i wouldn't say no to something sweet.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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eae0577
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He spent the next weeks blocking scenes of the bureaucrat fucking his wife. On the floor with cooking ingredients. Standing, with socks still on. In the grass of the yard of their new and immense house. He imagined her making noises she never made for him and feeling pleasures he could never provide because the bureaucrat was a man, and he was not a man. he wondered.
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humor
marriage
sex
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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54050d8
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It is as if after surviving so much, there was no longer reason to survive.
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life
survival
survivor
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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e477157
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Grandfather kicked the stop pedal, and my face gave a high-five to the front window.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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4fd74b1
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Cruelty depends on an understanding of cruelty, and the ability to choose against it. Or to choose to ignore it.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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85b79dd
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You will remember when a bird crashed through the window and fell to the floor. You will remember, those of you who were there, how it jerked its wings before dying, and left a spot of blood on the floor after it was removed. But who among you was first to notice the negative bird it left in the window? Who first saw the shadow that the bird left behind, the shadow that drew blood from any finger that dared to trace it, the shadow that was ..
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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a1a90b5
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I would have done anything for him. Maybe that was my sickness. We made love in nothing places and turned the lights off. It felt like crying. We could not look at each other. It always had to be from behind. Like that first time. And I knew he wasn't thinking of me. He squeezed my sides so hard, and pushed so hard. Like he was trying to push me through to somewhere else. Why does anyone ever make love?
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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d13dae4
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But I dig Negroes. I dig them all the way.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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e02b923
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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.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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8c73465
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August has passed, and yet summer continues by force to grow days. They sprout secretly between the chapters of the year, covertly included between its pages.
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imagery
page-109
summer
time
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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454eda5
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accepting the compromise of the way we have been, the way we are, and the way we will likely be...may we live together in unwavering love and good health, amen.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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6e1ad96
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I wish my days could be washed away like the chalk lines of my days.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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63792c3
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If god exists, he is not to be believed in.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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3f8022d
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The morning Julia found the phone, my parents were over for brunch. Everything was falling apart around Benjy, although I'll never know what he knew at the time, and neither will he. The adults were talking when he reentered the kitchen and said, "The sound of time. What happened to it?" "What are you talking about?" "You know," he said, waving his tiny hand about, "the sound of time." It took time - about five frustrating minutes - to figu..
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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3e759f8
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He spoke to her as if she could understand him, never in high pitch or in monosyllables, and never in nonsense words. This is milk that I am feeding you. It comes from Mordechai the milkman, whom you will meet one day. He gets the milk from a cow, which is a very strange and troubling thing if you think about it, so don't think about it . . . This is my hand that is petting your face. Some people are left-handed and some are right-handed. W..
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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a5773ea
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I brought the birdcages to the windows. I opened the windows, and opened the birdcages. I poured the fish down the drain. I took the dogs and cats downstairs and removed their collars. I released the insects onto the street. And the reptiles. And the mice. I told them, Go. All of you. Go. And they went. And they didn't come back
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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85a0334
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In the end I was the clay and she was the sculptor, I thought, it's a shame that we have to live, but it's a tragedy that we get to live only one life, because if I'd had two lives, I would have spent one of them with her.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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7b0bdab
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Dogs are wonderful, and in many ways unique. But they are remarkably unremarkable in their intellectual and experiential capacities. Pigs are every bit as intelligent and feeling, by any sensible definition of the words. They can't hop into the back of a Volvo, but they can fetch, run and play, be mischievous, and reciprocate affection. So why don't they get to curl up by the fire? Why can't they at least be spared being tossed on the fire?
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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e7eafbd
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I started carrying blank books like this one around, which I would fill with all the things I couldn't say...
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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9cbfedb
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What were we spending so much time doing if not getting to know each other?
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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2e14b28
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Mom said, "His spirit is there," and that made me really angry. I told her, "Dad didn't have a spirit! He had cells!" "His memory is there." "His memory is here," I said, pointing at my head. "Dad had a spirit," she said, like she was rewinding a bit in our conversation. I told her, "He had cells, and now they're on rooftops, and in the river, and in the lungs of millions of people around New York, who breathe him every time they speak!"
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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2197574
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He looked so much like me, I could tell that he saw it, too, we shared the smile of recognizing ourselves in each other, how many imposters do I have? DO we all make the same mistakes, or has one of us gotten it right, or even just a bit less wrong, am I the imposter?
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look-alike
mistakes
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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42483bc
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Can't you even tell me if I'm on the right track?" Buckminster purred, and Dad shrugged his shoulders again. "But if you don't tell me anything, how can I ever be right?" He circled something in an article and said, "Another way of looking at it would be, how could you ever be wrong?"
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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58a9b84
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The end of suffering does not justify the suffering, what a mess I am, I thought, what a fool, how foolish and narrow, how worthless, how pinched and pathetic, how helpless.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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402bff8
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I could tell that Mom was dreaming, but I didn't want to know what she was dreaming about, because I had enough of my own nightmares, and if she had been dreaming something happy, I would have been angry at her for dreaming something happy.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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ddd027f
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Only now do I understand the war against boredom, the lost cause of empty hours, of empty days and nights.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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62bc672
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But when, at the end of my sophomore year, I became a philosophy major and started doing my first seriously pretentious thinking, I became a vegetarian again. The kind of willful forgetting that I was sure meat eating required felt too paradoxical to the intellectual life I was trying to shape. I thought life could, should, and must conform to the mold of reason. You can imagine how annoying this made me.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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221f1bb
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I asked my schoolmate Mary to write a letter to me. She was funny and full of life. She liked to run around her empty house without any clothes on, even once she was too old for that. Nothing embarrassed her. I admired that so much, because everything embarrassed me, and that hurt me. She loved to jump on her bed. She jumped on her bed for so many years that one afternoon, while I watched her jump, the seams burst. Feathers filled the small..
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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602c1fe
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She was so beautiful, like someone who you will never meet, but always dream of meeting, like someone who is too good for you.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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817d3b5
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Thanksgiving is the holiday that encompasses all others. All of them, from Martin Luther King Day to Arbor Day to Christmas to Valentine's Day, are in one way or another about being thankful.
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christmas
holidays
thankful
thanksgiving
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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064b109
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I spent my life learning to feel less. Every day I felt less. Is that growing old? Or is it something worse? You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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8d931f3
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In the end, everyone loses everyone. There was no invention to get around that.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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0ddcd7b
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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, is ignorance bliss, I don't know, but it's so painful to think, and tell me, what did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever bring me? I think and think and think, I've thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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76e925b
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The animals are those things that God likes but doesn't love.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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24536fa
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Life is precious, Jacob thought. The most important of all thoughts, and the most obvious, and the most difficult to remember to have. How different my life would have been if I could have had that thought before I was forced to.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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5987073
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My dream went all the way back to the beginning. The rain rose into the clouds, and the animals descended the ramp.
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dreams
noah-s-ark
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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11d3ed1
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He was like a book that you could feel good holding, that you could talk about without ever having read, that could you recommend.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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f1462bf
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So she had to satisfy herself with the idea of love - loving the loving of things whose existence she didn't care at all about. 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. It was not the world that was the great and saving lie, but her willingness to make bea..
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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e39038e
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The world is a big place," he said, "but so is the inside of an apartment!"
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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0bc53b9
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Books are for those without real lives, he thought. And they are no real replacement.
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life
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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1e5ae8a
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Every night before putting her to sleep, Yankel counts her ribs, as if one might have disappeared in the course of the day and become the seed and soil for some new companion to steal her away from him.
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Jonathan Safran Foer |