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She Had Fallen In Love So Many Times That She Began To Suspect She Was Not Falling In Love At All, But Doing Something Much More Ordinary.
-Jonathan Safran Foer
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She Had Fallen In

Jonathan Safran Foer
...
She Had Fallen In Love So Many Times That She Began To Suspect She Was Not Falling In Love At All, But Doing Something Much More Ordinary.

Understanding the Quote: "she had fallen in love so many times that she began to..."

This quote by Jonathan Safran Foer reflects deeply on the theme of falling in love. It connects to the universal human journey of purpose, motivation, and reflection. Often categorized under Falling In Love, Ordinary, Fallen, the quote offers insight, emotional clarity, and intellectual inspiration to readers worldwide.

Whether you’re a student exploring new ideas, a leader trying to motivate your team, or someone seeking direction in life — this quote provides value. It resonates because it’s more than words — it’s a bridge between experience and wisdom. It shows how Jonathan Safran Foer interprets life's core challenges and triumphs.

Lessons From the Quote

This quote teaches resilience and focus. It reminds readers that no matter where they stand in life, reflection and self-awareness lead to growth. Each word has meaning, and when studied, it becomes clear how impactful thoughtful language can be.

About Jonathan Safran Foer

Jonathan Safran Foer is celebrated for insightful thoughts on falling in love and ordinary. Their legacy lives on through writings that guide, comfort, and inspire. Discover more on their profile page.

Actionable Takeaways

  • Reflect on how this quote applies to your current life path.
  • Share the message with someone who needs inspiration.
  • Write your thoughts on this quote in a journal or blog post.
  • Use it as a daily affirmation or reminder.

Closing Thoughts

Quotes like this endure because they capture universal truths. They comfort us in solitude and empower us in groups. Carry this quote forward — live by its wisdom, share its message, and keep its essence alive.

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Topic
Falling In Love
Ordinary
Fallen
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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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...and When Is Enough Proof Enough?
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Hunting
Humans
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Book
Past
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Made
Loud
Whether We Change Our Lives Or Do Nothing, We Have Responded. To Do Nothing Is To Do Something.
Our Lives
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Here I Am
Able
Too Much
I Started Carrying Blank Books Like This One Around, Which I Would Fill With All The Things I Couldn't Say.
Book
Blank
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Goodbye
Love You
Bruises
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Hero
Long
Effort
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Believe
People
She Had Fallen In Love So Many Times That She Began To Suspect She Was Not Falling In Love At All, But Doing Something Much More Ordinary.
Falling In Love
Ordinary
Fallen
Our Love Was The Affliction For Which Only Our Love Was The Cure.
Our Love
Affliction
Cures
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Understanding
Cruelty
Ability
I Don't Think That There Are Any Limits To How Excellent We Could Make Life Seem.
Life
Thinking
Limits
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Family
Hate
Mean
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Imposter
Recognizing
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Might
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Something Sweet
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Wall
Character
Reflection
If There Is No Love In The World, We Will Make A New World, And We Will Give It Walls, And We Will Furnish It With Soft Red Interiors, From The Inside Out, And Give It A Knocker That Resonates Like A Diamond Falling To A Jeweller's Felt So That We Should Never Hear It. Love Me, Because Love Doesn't Exist, And I Have Tried Everything That Does.
Love
Wall
Fall
To Feel Alone Is To Be Alone.
Feels
Everything Is Illuminated
Time Was Passing Like A Hand Waving From A Train I Wanted To Be On. I Hope You Never Have To Think About Anything As Much As I Think About You.
Love
Pain
Thinking
What If I Never Stop Inventing?
What If
Inventing
Ifs
I Wish My Days Could Be Washed Away Like The Chalk Lines Of My Days.
Wish
Lines
Chalk
Part Of Living Your Life Is An Awareness Of The Opportunities That Can Be Missed And An Awareness That Time Moves In One Direction.
Moving
Opportunity
Live Your Life
Just To Be A Functioning Adult In The World, We Develop All Of These Layers Of Protection. When We See Homeless People, We Don't Cry, Even Though Homeless People Probably Deserve Our Tears - You Know, It's A Horrible Thing.
People
Tears
World
I Ran Rather Than Walked, Anxious To Lose My Way. All I Wanted Was To Be Unsure.
Way
Anxious
Wanted
It’s Much Easier To Be Cruel Than One Might Think.
Kindness
Thinking
Might
I Like To See People Reunited, I Like To See People Run To Each Other, I Like The Kissing And The Crying, I Like The Impatience, The Stories That The Mouth Can't Tell Fast Enough, The Ears That Aren't Big Enough, The Eyes That Can't Take In All Of The Change, I Like The Hugging, The Bringing Together, The End Of Missing Someone.
Running
Missing Someone
Eye
Weeks Passed Like Boats Waiting To Sail Into The Starless Dawn, We Were Full Of Aimless Endless Darkness.
Bored
Waiting
Darkness
Is There Really Anyone, Besides Rudy Giuliani, Who Prefers The New Times Square?
Squares
Rudy
Times Square
The Bruises Go Away, And So Does How You Hate, And So Does The Feeling That Everything You Receive From Life Is Something You Have Earned.
Hate
Feelings
Going Away
And Also, There Are So Many Times When You Need To Make A Quick Escape, But Humans Don't Have Their Own Wings, Or Not Yet, Anyway, So What About A Birdseed Shirt?
Wings
Needs
Shirts
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 Better Proof Of The Bird's Existence Than The Bird Ever Was?
Wings
Blood
Bird
There Are Still Many Different Ways To Get Stuck, Existentially Stuck. Feeling Like, "this Is Worthless. I'm Wasting My Time, And I Would Be Wasting The Time Of Someone Who Tried To Read This." It Happens All The Time.
Feelings
Different
Would Be
Everyone Performs Bad Actions... A Bad Person Is Someone Who Does Not Lament His Bad Actions.
Doe
Action
Persons
But What She Was Really Trying To Say Was This: I Like Music Better Than Anything In The World, After You.
Trying
World
She Wanted Nothing More Than Someone To Miss, To Touch, With Whom To Speak Like A Child, With Whom To Be A Child.
Children
Missing
Speak
And She Would Say, "today You Believe In God?" And He Would Say, "today I Believe In Love".
Believe
Today
I Believe
The Torah Is The Foundational Text For Jewish Law, But The Haggadah Is Our Book Of Living Memory. We Are Not Merely Telling A Story Here. We Are Being Called To A Radical Act Of Empathy. Here We Are, Embarking On An Ancient, Perennial Attempt To Give Human Lives - Our Lives - Dignity.
Memories
Book
Law
Sometimes I Imagined Stitching All Of Our Little Touches Together. How Many Hundreds Of Thousands Of Fingers Brushing Against Each Other Does It Take To Make Love? Why Does Anyone Ever Make Love?
Making Love
Together
Doe
One Of The Greatest Opportunities To Live Our Values-or Betray Them-lies In The Food We Put On Our Plates.
Lying
Opportunity
Plates
...because He Had Been Waiting For Someone To Come Back To Him, So Every Time Someone Knocked On The Door, He Couldn't Stop Himself From Hoping It Might Be That Person, Even Though He Knew He Shouldn't Hope.
Doors
Waiting
Might
I Felt, That Night, On That Stage, Under That Skull, Incredibly Close To Everything In The Universe, But Also Extremely Alone. I Wondered, For The First Time In My Life, If Life Was Worth All The Work It Took To Live. What Exactly Made It Worth It? What's So Horrible About Being Dead Forever, And Not Feeling Anything, And Not Even Dreaming? What's So Great About Feeling And Dreaming?
Dream
Night
Skulls
I Zipped Myself All The Way Into The Sleeping Bag Of Myself, Not Because I Was Hurt, And Not Because I Had Broken Something, But Because They Were Cracking Up.
Hurt
Sleep
Broken
In Truth I Was Manufacturing A Brick Wall Of Shits.
Wall
Bricks
Brick Wall
Writing'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.
Writing
Dark
Light
Just Because You're An Atheist, That Doesn't Mean You Wouldn't Love For Things To Have Reasons For Why They Are.
Atheist
Mean
Reason
We Aren’t Exactly Emptying The Oceans; It’s More Like Clear-cutting A Forest With Thousands Of Species To Create Massive Fields With One Type Of Soybean.
Ocean
Cutting
Soybeans
Which, Then, Brings Us Closer To What We Want To Communicate: Saying What We Intend, Or Trying To Say The Opposite?
Opposites
Trying
Want
My Dream Went All The Way Back To The Beginning. The Rain Rose Into The Clouds, And The Animals Descended The Ramp.
Dream
Rain
Animal
How Did Her Life Live Itself Without Her.
Timepieces
We Talked About Nothing In Particular, But It Felt Like We Were Talking About The Most Important Things.
Talking
Important
Particular
Find 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.
Football
Running
Wall
And Here I Am, Instead Of There. I'm Sitting In This Library, Thousands Of Miles From My Life, Writing Another Letter I Know I Won't Be Able To Send, No Matter How Hard I Try And How Much I Want To. How Did That Boy Making Love Behind That Shed Become This Man Writing This Letter At This Table?
Writing
Boys
Men
Jed Perl Writes Precisely And Ecstatically. Antoine' S Alphabet Is A History And A Fairy Tale, A Work Of Criticism, And A Work Of Art.
Art
Writing
Criticism
Perhaps 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.
Memories
Dark
Science
Eating A Piece Of Meat, At Its Most Efficient, We Could Say Is Like Throwing Away Six Times That Amount Of Food Every Time You Eat It Because You're Recycling All Those Calories Through It. I Know A Lot Of People Who Came To This Issue Not Through Animal Welfare But Through Wastefulness.
Animal
Issues
People
It Was The First Time I Had Ever Made Love. I Wondered If He Knew That. It Felt Like Crying. I Wondered, Why Does Anyone Ever Make Love?
Making Love
Doe
Firsts
What's So Horrible About Being Dead Forever, And Not Feeling Anything, And Not Even Dreaming? What's So Great About Feeling And Dreaming?
Dream
Forever
Feelings
Since The World Has Changed So Much, The Same Values Don't Lead To The Same Choices Anymore.
Choices
World
Changed
Tomorrow Was Over The Horizon, And Would Take An Entire Day To Reach.
Horizon
Tomorrow
Try To Live So That You Can Always Tell The Truth.
Trying
Telling The Truth
As A Writer, Putting Words On The Page Is How I Pay Attention.
Attention
Pay
Pages
What Do Babies Dream Of? She Must Be Dreaming Of The Before-life, Just As I Dream Of The Afterlife.
Dream
Baby
Afterlife
It Was Not The Feeling Of Completeness I So Needed, But The Feeling Of Not Being Empty.
Life
Feelings
Emptiness
But I Still Couldn't Figure Out What It All Meant. The More I Found Out, The Less I Understood.
Figures
Found
Understood
I Have Made My Own Choice, Which Is Vegetarianism, But It's Not The Choice I'm Imposing On Anybody Else.
Vegetarianism
Choices
Made
There Is A Glaring Reason That The Necessary Total Ban On Nontherapeutic Use Of Antibiotics Hasn't Happened: The Factory Farm Industry, Allied With The Pharmaceutical Industry, Has More Power Than Public-health Professionals.
Use
Antibiotics
Health Professionals
I Wasn’t Having Second Thoughts, But I Was Having Thoughts.
Second Thoughts
We Were Trying To Make Our Lives Easier, Trying, With All Our Rules, To Make Life Effortless. But A Friction Began To Arise Between Nothing And Something, In The Morning The Nothing Vase Cast A Something Shadow, Like The Memory Of Someone You've Lost, What Can You Say About That, At Night The Nothing Light Spilled From The Guest Room Spilled Under The Nothing Door And Stained The Something Hallway, There's Nothing To Say.
Morning
Memories
Night
Nine Out Of Ten Significant People Have To Do With Money Or War!
War
People
Nine
What The Meat Industry Figured Out Is That You Don't Need Healthy Animals To Make A Profit. Sick Animals Are More Profitable... Factory Farms Calculate How Close To Death They Can Keep Animals Without Killing Them. That's The Business Model. How Quickly They Can Be Made To Grow, How Tightly They Can Be Packed, How Much Or How Little Can They Eat, How Sick They Can Get Without Dying...we Live In A World In Which It's Conventional To Treat An Animal Like A Block Of Wood.
Block
Animal
Meat Industry
I’d Rather Somebody Hate What I Do Than Be Indifferent To It.
Hate
Indifferent
...the Meaning Of My Thoughts Started To Float Away From Me, Like Leaves That Fall From A Tree Into A River, I Was The Tree, The World Was The River.
Fall
Rivers
Tree
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.
Philosophy
Thinking
Years
She Said, 'believe It Or Not, I Used To Be Idealistic.' I Asked Her What 'idealistic' Meant. 'it Means You Live By What You Think Is Right.' 'you Don't Do That Anymore?' 'there Are Questions I Don't Ask Anymore.
Believe
Mean
Thinking
It Was Getting Hard To Keep All The Things I Didn't Know Inside Me.
Knows
Hard
Highs And Lows Make You Feel That Things Matter, But They're Nothing." "so What's Something?" "being Reliable Is Something. Being Good.
Matter
Lows
Be Good
It's So Beautiful At This Hour. The Sun Is Low, The Shadows Are Long, The Air Is Cold And Clean. You Won't Be Awake For Another Five Hours, But I Can't Help Feeling That We're Sharing This Clear And Beautiful Morning.
Beautiful
Morning
Air
Sometimes I Can Hear My Bones Straining Under The Weight Of All The Lives I'm Not Living.
Life
I Hate You
Weight
Nothing Is Beautiful And True.
Beautiful
In The Water I Saw My Father's Face, And That Face Saw The Face Of Its Father, And So On, And So On, Reflecting Backward To The Beginning Of Time, To The Face Of God, In Whose Image We Were Created.
Father
Water
Faces
I See Myself As Someone Who Makes Things. Definitions Have Never Done Anything But Constrain.
Done
Definitions
Constrain
How Beautiful Is Forgetting! What Relief It Would Be For The World To Lose Some Of Its Contents.
Beautiful
Relief
Would Be
But Come. No Explaining Or Mending. Be Beside Me Somewhere.
Mending
Explaining
Words Never Mean What We Want Them To Mean.
Mean
Want
Language
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.
Dad
People
Tree
I Could Not Believe In A God That Would Challenge Faith Like This.
Atheist
Believe
Challenges
All Really Great Artists, Jackson Pollack, John Cage, Beckett Or Joyce - You Are Never Indifferent To Them.
Artist
Cages
Beckett
I Dreamt Four Nights Ago Of Clock Hands Descending From The Universe Like Rain, Of The Moon As A Green Eye, Of Mirrors And Insects, Of A Love That Never Withdrew. It Was Not The Feeling Of Completeness That I So Needed, But The Feeling Of Not Being Empty.
Rain
Eye
Moon
I Asked Her, "are You An Optimist Or A Pessimist?" She Looked At Her Watch And Said, "i'm Optimistic." "then I Have Some Bad News For You, Because Humans Are Going To Destroy Each Others As Soon As It Becomes Easy Enough To, Which Will Be Very Soon." "why Do Beautiful Songs Make You Sad?" "because They Aren't True." "never?" "nothing Is Beautiful And True." She Smiled, But In A Way That Wasn't Just Happy, And Said, "you Sound Just Like Dad.
Beautiful
Song
Dad
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