03c. 1977 ADA few weeks after the worst day, I started writing lots of letters. I don't know why, but it was one of the only things that made my boots lighter.Jonathan Safran Foer / quote ↗
04c. 1977 ADWriting's funny, it's like walking down a hall in the dark looking for the light switch, and suddenly you find it, flip it on, and then you discover the hallway you passed through is papered with the novel you've written.Jonathan Safran Foer / quote ↗
06c. 1977 ADI realized that your mother couldn't see the emptiness, she couldn't see anything...All of the words I'd written to her over all of those years, had I never said anything to hear at all?Jonathan Safran Foer / quote ↗
07c. 1977 ADGod loves the plagiarist. And so it is written, 'God created humankind in His image, in the image of God He created them." God is the original plagiarizer. With a lack of reasonable sources from which to filch - man created in the image of what? the animals? - the creation of man was an act of reflexive plagiarizing; God looted the mirror. When we plagiarize, we are likewise creating in the image and participating in the completion of Creation.Jonathan Safran Foer / quote ↗
08c. 1977 ADMesa, adorno de marfil, arcoíris, cebolla, peinado, molusco, Sabbat, violencia, cutícula, melodrama, cuneta, miel, pañuelo... Nada la conmovía. (...) Nada conseguía ser más de lo que era en realidad. Eran solo cosas, prisioneras de su propia esencia.Jonathan Safran Foer / quote ↗
09c. 1977 ADParents are always more knowledgeable than their children, and children are always smarter than their parents.Jonathan Safran Foer / quote ↗
10c. 1977 ADSam enjoyed knowledge. The accumulation and distribution of facts gave him a feeling of control, of utility, of the opposite of the powerlessness that comes with having a smallish, underdeveloped body that doesn't dependably respond to the mental commands of a largish, overstimulated brain.Jonathan Safran Foer / quote ↗
11c. 1977 ADTouch 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. A palm on a neck: it all flooded back. A head leaned upon a shoulder: the chemicals surged, the memory of love. At times, it was almost impossible to cross the distance between their bodies, to reach out. At times, it was impossible. Each new the feeling so well, in the silence of a darkened bedroom, looking at the same ceiling: If I could open my fingers, my heart's fingers could open.Jonathan Safran Foer / quote ↗
12c. 1977 ADBetween any two beings there is a unique, uncrossable distance, an unenterable sanctuary. Sometimes it takes the shape of aloneness. Sometimes it takes the shape of love.Jonathan Safran Foer / quote ↗
13c. 1977 ADIn the struggle between yourself and the world, side with the worldJonathan Safran Foer / quote ↗
14c. 1977 ADFrom 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 all year. Smaller cities will also be seen, but with great difficulty. Towns will be virtually impossible to spot. Individual couples invisible.Jonathan Safran Foer / quote ↗
15c. 1977 ADAnyone who believes that a second is faster than a decade did not live life.Jonathan Safran Foer / quote ↗
16c. 1977 ADIsn’t it so weird how the number of dead people is increasing even though the earth stays the same size, so that one day there isn’t going to be room to bury anyone anymore? For my ninth birthday last year, Grandma gave me a subscription to National Geographic, which she calls “the National Geographic.” She also gave me a white blazer, because I only wear white clothes, and it’s too big to wear so it will last me a long time. She also gave me Grandpa’s camera, which I loved for two reasons. I asked why he didn’t take it with him when he left her. She said, “Maybe he wanted you to have it.” I said, “But I was negative-thirty years old.” She said, “Still.” 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!Jonathan Safran Foer / quote ↗
17c. 1977 ADFuck You!' [Oskar said] 'Exuse me!' [His mom said] 'Sorry. I mean, screw you.' 'You need a time-out!' 'I need a mausoleum!Jonathan Safran Foer / quote ↗
18c. 1977 ADPerhaps in the back of our minds we already understand, without all the science I've discussed, that something terribly wrong is happening. Our sustenance now comes from misery. We know that if someone offers to show us a film on how our meat is produced, it will be a horror film. 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.Jonathan Safran Foer / quote ↗
19c. 1977 ADNeedless to say, jamming deformed, drugged, overstressed birds together in a filthy, waste-coated room is not very healthy. Beyond deformities, eye damage, blindness, bacterial infections of bones, slipped vertebrae, paralysis, internal bleeding, anemia, slipped tendons, twisted lower legs and necks, respiratory diseases, and weakened immune systems are frequent and long-standing problems on factory farms.Jonathan Safran Foer / quote ↗
20c. 1977 ADFind a printer paper and imagine a full-grown bird shaped something like a football with legs standing on it. Imagine 33,000 of these rectangles in a grid. (Broilers are never in cages, and never on multiple levels.) Now enclose the grid with windowless walls and put a ceiling on top. Run in automated (drug-laced) feed, water, heating, and ventilation systems. This is a farm.Jonathan Safran Foer / quote ↗
21c. 1977 ADJust how common do such savageries have to be for a decent person to be unable to overlook them? If you knew that one in one thousand food animals suffered actions like those described above, would you continue to eat animals? One in one hundred? One in ten?Jonathan Safran Foer / quote ↗
22c. 1977 ADSo many people enter and leave your life! Hundreds of thousands of people! You have to keep the door open so they can come in! But it also means you have to let them go!Jonathan Safran Foer / quote ↗
23c. 1977 ADSo it had something to do with the sinner, and something with the judge, and the fear of not being forgiven, and the relief of being loved again.Jonathan Safran Foer / quote ↗
24c. 1977 ADI feel too much. That's what's going on.' 'Do you think one can feel too much? Or just feel in the wrong ways?' 'My insides don't match up with my outsides.' 'Do anyone's insides 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 outside.' 'But it's worse for me.' 'I wonder if everyone thinks it's worse for him.' 'Probably. But it really is worse for me.Jonathan Safran Foer / quote ↗
