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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 1e5130a | When we found each other, I was very flabbergasted by his appearance. This is an American? I thought. And also, This is a Jew? He was severely short. He wore spectacles and had diminutive hairs which were not split anywhere, but rested on his head like a Shapka. (If i were like Father, I might even have dubbed him Shapka.) He did not appear like either the Americans I had witnessed in magazines, with yellow hairs and muscles, or the Jews fr.. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 95b1603 | if we are to be such nomads with the truth, why do we not make the story more premium than life? It seems to me that we are making the story even inferior. We often make ourselves appear as though we are foolish people, and we make our voyage, which was an ennobled voyage, appear very normal and second rate. We could give your grandfather two arms, and could make him high-fidelity. We could give Brod what she deserves in the stead of what s.. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| f6abec1 | desperately knocking against the blind little world, i loosened one of its planks, opening a window to a new, wider world. There, spread out, was a profusion of geography, of atmosphere, of full empty air. | pages-68-69 poetic | Jonathan Safran Foer | |
| 929bf26 | We're here, the glow of 1804 will say in one and a half centuries. We're here, and we're alive. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 0f85ff5 | She took the posters downtown that afternoon. She filled a rolling suitcase with them ... she took a stapler. And a box of staples. And hope. I think of those things. The paper, the stapler, the staples, the tape, the hope. It makes me sick. Physical things. Forty years of loving someone becomes staples and hop. | grief loss hope staples stapler | Jonathan Safran Foer | |
| 71fb616 | Oskar. The night before I lost everything was like any other night. Anna and I kept each other awake very late. We laughed. Young sisters in bed under the roof of their childhood home. Wind on the window. How could anything less deserve to be destroyed? I thought we would be awake all night. Awake for the rest of our lives. The spaces between our words grew. It became difficult to tell when we were talking and when we were silent. The hairs.. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| e9be794 | It was not the Jew, of course, who invented the love poem, but the other way around. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| a334c72 | I have witnessed Grandfather cry, and I implore myself to say that I desire to never witness him cry again. If this signifies that I must do things for him so that he will not cry, then I will do those things. If this signifies that I must not look when he cries, then I will not look. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 9216f72 | He would wake from sleep to miss the weight that never depress the bed next to him, remember in earnest the weight of gestures she never made, long for the un-weight of her un-arm slung over his too real chest, making his widower's remembrances that much more convincing and the pain that much more real. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| bab95a5 | My mind wandered to all those years of school portraits: the licked palms wrestling cowlicks under the pretense of a loving stroke; letting the boys watch a cartoon while sliding them into handsome, uncomfortable clothes; clumsy efforts to subliminally communicate the value of a "natural" smile. The pictures always came out the same: a forced grin with unparted lips, eyes vacantly gazing into the haze--something from the Diane Arbus scrap p.. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 4685f95 | I pointed at, Something. He pointed at, Nothing. I pointed at, Something. Nobody pointed at, I love you. There was no way around it. We could not climb over it, or walk until we found its edge. I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live, Oskar. Because if I were able to live my life again, I would do things differently. I would change my life. I would kiss my piano teacher, even if he laughed at me. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| e57209c | I put my hands into the pockets of all his jackets | pockets things-that-i-do touch | Jonathan Safran Foer | |
| 58ddb03 | 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 boroughs and for cities, a pocket that could hold the universe. But I knew there couldn't be pockets that enormous. In the end, everyone loses everyone. There was no invention to get around that, and so I felt, that night, like the turtle that every.. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 0743f07 | No one fired a pistol to mark the start of the race to the bottom. The earth just tilted and everyone slid into the hole. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 01c40de | One weird thing is, I wonder if everyone's hearts would start to beat at the same time, like how women who live together have their menstrual periods at the same time, which I know about, but don't really want to know about. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 67c9434 | Most people behave badly when wounded. If you can remember the wounds, it is far more possible to forgive the behavior. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 6d4f343 | Today, it isn't unusual for meat to travel almost halfway around the globe to reach your supermarket. The average distance our meat travels hovers arounf fifteen hundred miles. | food-for-thought meat | Jonathan Safran Foer | |
| 80bdd5f | A powerful wind swept through the shtetl, making it whistle. Those studying obscure texts in dimly lit rooms looked up. Lovers making amends and promises, amendments and excuses, fell silent. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| ec1f1e6 | We go on killing each other to no purpose! It is war waged by humanity against humanity, and it will only end when there's no one left to fight! | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| b2c7639 | I' was the last word I was able to speak aloud. I wanted to pull the thread, unravel the scarf of my silence and start again from the beginning, but instead I said, 'I.' I know I'm not alone in this disease, you hear the old people in the street and some of them are moaning, "Ay yay yay," but some of them are clinging to their last word, 'I,' they're saying, because they're desperate, it's not a complaint it's a prayer, and then I lost 'I' .. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 3ae3922 | I knew that we were sharing something with our eyes, but I didn't know what, and I didn't know if it mattered. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 53aa07e | Lo que olvidamos de los animales es lo que empezamos a olvidar de nosotros mismos. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| c45f71d | He shrugged his shoulders, like he had no idea what I was talking about. I loved that. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 37a046e | I'm not mad at you," she said. "Not even a little?" "No." "Do you still love me?" It didn't seem like the perfect time to mention that I had already made copies of the key for the deliverer from Pizza Hut, and the UPS person, and, also the nice guys from Greenpeace, so they could leave me articles on manatees and other animals that are going extinct when Stan is getting coffee. "I've never loved you more." | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 1ecdb6c | Home is the place with the most rules. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| afedaef | La verguenza es la sensacion que nos invade cuando olvidamos casi por completo, pero no del todo, las expectativas sociales y nuestras obligaciones para con los otros, a cambio de nuestra satisfaccion inmediata. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 0f4d14a | The appearance was misleading- human dreams; rubbish heaps abundant yet ephemeral sudden and splendid, only to wilt and perish | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| e62b1c0 | When I learned about this, I was told that it was "instinct." ("Instinct" continues to be the explanation of choice whenever animal behavior implies too much intelligence.) Instinct, though, wouldn't go very far in explaining how pigeons use human transportation routes to navigate. Pigeons follow highways and take particular exits, likely following many of the same landmarks as the humans driving below." | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| fa17f89 | The horse at the bottom of the river, shrouded by the sunken night sky, closed its heavy eyes. The prehistoric ant in Yankel's ring, which had lain motionless in the honey-colored amber since long before Noah hammered the first plank, hid its head between its many legs, in shame. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 2223712 | He promised us that everything would be OK. I was a child, but I knew that everything would not be OK. That did not make my father a liar. It made him my father. | promises | Jonathan Safran Foer | |
| 51627b5 | That ghost of a smile fell away and receded and finally faded. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 0612e0c | Only a few months into our marriage, we started marking off areas in the apartment as "Nothing Places," in which one could be assured of complete privacy, we agreed that we never would look at the marked-off zones, that they would be nonexistent territories in the apartment in which one could temporarily cease to exist, the first was in the bedroom, by the foot of the bed, we marked it off with red tape on the carpet, and it was just large .. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| c7c663f | I thought he had to look for what he was looking for, and realize it no longer existed, or never existed." p. 233" | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| c8c8bab | Make for yourself a world you can believe in. It sounds simple, I know. But it's not. Listen, there are a million worlds you could make for yourself. Everyone you know has a completely different one--the woman in 5G, that cab driver over there, you. Sure, there are overlaps, but only in the details. Some people make their worlds around what they think reality is like. They convince themselves that they had nothing to do with their worlds' c.. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| e1c2b67 | The dining table was covered with platters of food: everything and pumpernickel bagels, everything minibagels, everything flagels, bialys, cream cheese, scallion cream cheese, salmon spread, tofu spread, smoked and pickled fish, pitch-black brownies with white chocolate swirls like square universes, blondies, rugelach, out-of-season hamantaschen (strawberry, prune, and poppy seed), and "salads"--Jews apply the word salad to anything that ca.. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 477294d | Just how destructive does a culinary preference have to be before we decide to eat something else? If contributing to the suffering of billions of animals that live miserable lives and (quite often) die in horrific ways isn't motivating, what would be? If being the number one contributor to the most serious threat facing the planet (global warming) isn't enough, what is? And if you are tempted to put off these questions of conscience, to sa.. | vegan vegetarian | Jonathan Safran Foer | |
| 77acd40 | Isn't it funny that if God were to reveal and explain Himself, the majority of the world would necessarily be disappointed? | short-story the-new-yorker | Jonathan Safran Foer | |
| 11254ab | Anyone who suggests that there is a perfect symbiosis between the farmers' interest and the animals' is probably trying to sell you something (and it's not made of tofu) | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 6f90435 | It might sound fantastic, but when we bother to look, it's hard to deny that our day-to-day choices shape the world. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 78e4da4 | We perhaps know more than we care to admit, keeping it down in the dark places of our memory-disavowed. When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own. | phylosophy factory-farming vegetarianism nonfiction | Jonathan Safran Foer | |
| d176e8e | And this is what living next to a waterfall is like, Safran. Every widow wakes one morning, perhaps after years of pure and unwavering grieving, to realize she slept a good night's sleep, and will be able to eat breakfast, and doesn't hear her husband's ghost all the time, but only some of the time. Her grief is replaced with useful sadness. Every parent who loses a child finds a way to laugh again. The timbre begins to fade. The edge dulls.. | pain self-growth | Jonathan Safran Foer | |
| 33b4a14 | When you're a dad, there's no one above you. If I don't do something that has to be done, who is going to do it? | fathers fatherhood | Jonathan Safran Foer | |
| 4225df9 | For Nicole, my idea of beauty | dedication | Jonathan Safran Foer | |
| 851900f | I couldn't tell what he was feeling, because I couldn't speak the language of his feelings. | Jonathan Safran Foer |