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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| e6ec037 | It's not that you're wrong. But when you say stuff like this, it makes life a lot less enjoyable. | Curtis Sittenfeld | ||
| dbd0704 | When I think of Henry and Oliver and Mike, I feel as if they are three different models - templates, almost - and I wonder if they are the only three in the world: the man who is with you completely, the man who is with you but not with you, the man who will get as close to you as he can without ever becoming yours. It would be arrogant to claim no other dynamics exist just because I haven't experienced them, but I have to say that I can't .. | Curtis Sittenfeld | ||
| bc3b616 | She always saw through him, as if he were just another window. She always felt that she knew everything about him that could be known. Not that he was simple, but that he was knowable, like a list of errands, like an encyclopedia. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 132c667 | It was the feeling of not wanting to live in the world, even if it was the only place to live. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 9c0dab5 | Nobody likes war not even those who survive it, not even the winners. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 43e5b18 | There are worse things, worse than being like us. Look, at least we're alive. | life truth | Jonathan Safran Foer | |
| db29ead | I opened the coffin. I was surprised again, although again I shouldn't have been. I was surprised that Dad wasn't there. In my brain I knew he wouldn't be, obviously, but I guess my heart believed something else. Or maybe I was surprised by incredibly empty it was. I felt like I was looking into the dictionary definition of emptiness. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 4d38aa1 | 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 would hurt him, so I buried them, and let them hurt me. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 26de7b0 | He asked what was wrong. "It's just that why would you have one for him and not one for my dad?" "What do you mean!" "It isn't fair." "What isn't fair!" "My dad was good. Mohammed Atta was evil." "So!" "So my dad deserves to be in there." "What makes you think it's good to be in here!" "Because it means you're biographically significant." "And why is that good!" "I want to be significant." "Nine out of ten significant people have to do with.. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| a41ad7d | Once upon a time, USDA inspectors had to condemn any bird with such fecal contamination. But about thirty years ago, the poultry industry convinced the USDA to reclassify feces so that it could continue to use these automatic eviscerators. Once a dangerous contaminant, feces are now classified as a "cosmetic blemish." | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| e659c8e | That's all anyone wants from anyone else, not love itself but the knowledge that the love is there. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 6819c9b | It's true, I am afraid of dying. I am afraid of the world moving forward without me, of my absence going unnoticed, or worse, being some natural force propelling life on. Is it selfish? Am I such a bad person for dreaming of a world that ends when I do? | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| f65582b | I decided then and there never to become someone who told jokes when explanations were impossible. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| a16fa1f | It [the trip] captured five very long hours. If you want to know why, it is because Grandfather is Grandfather first and a driver second. He made us lost often and became on his nerves. I had to translate his anger into useful information for the hero. "Fuck," Grandfather said. I said, "He says that if you look at the statues, you can see that some no longer endure. Those are where Communist statues used to be." "Fucking fuck, fuck!" Grandf.. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| af1adb5 | I couldn't explain my need to myself, and that's why it was such a beautiful need | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 22cf2de | Being reliable is something. Being good. | reliable something | Jonathan Safran Foer | |
| ef74c55 | He wrote, You're being crazy. You're going to catch a cold. I already have a cold. You are going to catch a colder. I could not believe he was making a joke. And I could not believe I laughed. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 815bffc | What about guns with sensors in the handles that could detect if you were angry, and if you were, they wouldn't fire, even if you were a police officer? What about skyscrapers made with moving parts, so they could rearrange themselves when they had to, and even open holes in their middles for planes to fly through? | planes skyscrapers | Jonathan Safran Foer | |
| 09f1f99 | Don't you find that strange? I can't believe I never found it strange before. It's like your name, how you don't notice it for so long, but when you finally do, you can't help but say it over and over, and wonder why you never thought it was strange that you should have that name, and that everyone has been calling you that name for you whole life. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| a552068 | When you hide your face from the world, you can't see the world. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 284e499 | People are always mistaking something that looks good for something that feels good. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 4fe2f65 | Everyone has a pipeline through which he pushes what he is willing and able to share of himself out into the world, and through which he takes in all of the world that he is willing and able to bear. Max's conduit wasn't bigger than anyone else's, it was simply unclogged. What | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 587a1d3 | Should he one day share it and be asked how autobiographical it was, he would say, "It's not my life, but it's me." | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 52f7ff0 | The absurdity of it, the agony and beauty of it, almost brought Jacob to his knees: these two independent consciousnesses, neither of which existed ten and a half years ago, and existed only because of him, could now not only operate free of him (that much he'd known for a long time), but demand freedom. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| a679d87 | and we stood next to each other because that is what friends do in the presence of evil or love. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 42a423c | Our response to the factory farm is ultimately a test of how we respond to the powerless, to the most distant, to the voiceless - it is a test of how we act when no one is forcing us to act one way or another. Consistency is not required, but engagement with the problem is. | factory-farming nonfiction vegetarian | Jonathan Safran Foer | |
| 20b644e | There is something about eating animals that tends to polarize: never eat them or never sincerely question eating them; become an activist or disdain activists. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 698c7cb | Are you an optimist or a pessimist?" "I can't remember. Which?" "Do you know what those words mean?" "Not really." "An optimist is positive and hopeful. A pessimist is negative and cynical." "I'm an optimist." "Well, that's good, because there's no irrefutable evidence. There's nothing that could convince someone who doesn't want to be convinced. But there is an abundance of clues that would give the wanting believer something to hold.. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| f252dde | It's an empowering idea. The entire goliath of the food industry is driven and determined by the choices we make as the waiter gets impatient for our order or in the practicalities ad whimsies of what we load into our shopping carts or farmers'-market bags. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 15ad6a9 | Each case of food-borne illness cannot be traced, but where we do know the original, or the "vehicle of transmission," it is, overwhelmingly, an animal product. According to the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC), poultry is by far the largest cause... 83 percent of all chicken meat (including organic and antibiotic-free brands) is infected with either campylobacter or salmonella at the time of purchase... The next time a friend has... "t.. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 910ec17 | What I've learned is that everything in life - and I mean, even the of it - can be turned into grace...the test is - for even one moment in our lives - not to strike back at something, no matter how bad it gets...when you're faced with the temptation to get angry or upset and to hit back - you just do it. You let the temptation roll over you and not touch you. The idea is not to add to the collective pain...and by not doing so, you make.. | Kira Salak | ||
| 20f1b24 | Everything that impeded him had to be outweighed, even if only by a fraction, by all that drove him on. | Ian McEwan | ||
| f572f05 | This was still the era - it would end later in that famous decade - when to be young was a social encumbrance, a mark of irrelevance, a faintly embarrassing condition for which marriage was the beginning of a cure. | Ian McEwan | ||
| 8882536 | Don't leave me here with my mind, I thought. | Ian McEwan | ||
| 6df2770 | These were the months that shaped us.behind all our frustrations over all these years has been the wish to get back to those happy days.Once we began to see the world differently we could feel time running out on us and we were impatient with each other.Every disagreement was an interruption of what we knew was possible-and soon there was only interruption.And in the end time did run out,but memories are still there,accusing us,and we still.. | Ian McEwan | ||
| f0bb997 | The primitive thinking of the supernaturally inclined amounts to what his psychiatric colleagues call a problem, or an idea, of reference. An excess of the subjective, the ordering of the world in line with your needs, an inability to contemplate your own unimportance. In Henry's view such reasoning belongs on a spectrum at whose far end, rearing like an abandoned temple, lies psychosis. | Ian McEwan | ||
| 4a50286 | When the wounded were screaming, you dreamed of sharing a little house somewhere, of an ordinary life, of a family line, connection. All around him, men were walking silently with their thoughts, reforming their lives, making resolutions. If I ever get out of this lot... They could never be counted, the dreamed-up children, mentally conceived on the walk into Dunkirk, and later made flesh. | family family-relationships inspiration love soldiers war | Ian McEwan | |
| dd9330c | Bernard was to remember this moment for the rest of his life. As they drank from their water bottles he was struck by the recently concluded war not as a historical, geopolitical fact but as a multiplicity, a near-infinity of private sorrows, as a boundless grief minutely subdivided without diminishment among individuals who covered the continent like dust, like spores whose separate identities would remain unknown, and whose totality showe.. | ian-mcewan world-war-ii | Ian McEwan | |
| 4565502 | She was weary of being outdoors, but she was not ready to go in. Was that really all there was in life, indoors or out? Wasn't there somewhere else for people to go? | Ian McEwan | ||
| 881ffb2 | She loved him, though not at this particular moment. | Ian McEwan | ||
| edee6a0 | At best he read popular science magazines like the Scientific American he had now, to keep himself up-to-date, in layman's terms, with physics generally. But even then his concentration was marred, for a lifetime's habit made him inconveniently watchful for his own name. He saw it as if in bold. It could leap out at him from an unread double page of small print, and sometimes he could sense it coming before the page turn. | humor ian-mcewan physics science | Ian McEwan | |
| 25b050e | Each day he made attempts ... but produced nothing but quotations, thinly or well disguised, of his own work. Nothing sprang free of its own idiom, its own authority, to offer the element of surprise that would be the guarantee of originality. | Ian McEwan | ||
| 5d7f5fe | Whelks are strange and comforting. They have no notion of community life and they breed very quietly. But they have a strong sense of personal dignity. Even lying face down in a tray of vinegar there is something noble about a whelk. Which cannot be said for everybody. | Jeanette Winterson | ||
| 746fa2f | Why then do you fear love in particular more than earthly existence in general?" Kafka replied as if from an astral distance: "You write: 'Why be more afraid of love than of other things in life?' And just before that: 'I experienced the intermittently divine for the first time, and more frequently than elsewhere, in love.' If you conjoin these two sentences, it's as if you had said: 'Why not fear every bush in the same way that you fear th.. | Franz Kafka |