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You Need To Have A Reader's Sympathy In Order To Accomplish Anything. It's Like At A Reading, I Find It's Better To Read Something Funny Than To Read Something Tragic. It Just Goes Over Better Because You Have A Finite Amount Of Time With Somebody. Of Course, In A Book, You Have A Lot Of Time. But You Still Do Want To Make A Certain Impression Right When You Begin.

-Jonathan Safran Foer

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You Need To Have

Jonathan Safran Foer

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You Need To Have A Reader's Sympathy In Order To Accomplish Anything. It's Like At A Reading, I Find It's Better To Read Something Funny Than To Read Something Tragic. It Just Goes Over Better Because You Have A Finite Amount Of Time With Somebody. Of Course, In A Book, You Have A Lot Of Time. But You Still Do Want To Make A Certain Impression Right When You Begin.

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And So It Was When Anyone Tried To Speak: Their Minds Would Become Tangled In Remembrance. Words Became Floods Of Thought With No Beginning Or End, And Would Drown The Speaker Before He Could Reach The Life Raft Of The Point He Was Trying To Make. It Was Impossible To Remember What One Meant, What, After All Of The Words, Was Intended.

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You Need To Have A Reader's Sympathy In Order To Accomplish Anything. It's Like At A Reading, I Find It's Better To Read Something Funny Than To Read Something Tragic. It Just Goes Over Better Because You Have A Finite Amount Of Time With Somebody. Of Course, In A Book, You Have A Lot Of Time. But You Still Do Want To Make A Certain Impression Right When You Begin.

What If I Never Stop Inventing?

And The Joys I've Felt Have Not Always Been Joyous. I Could Have Lived Differently. When I Was Your Age, My Grandfather Bought Me A Ruby Bracelet. It As Too Big For Me An Would Slide Up And Down My Arm. It Was Almost A Necklace. He Later Told Me That He Had Asked The Jeweler Make That Way. Its Size Was Supposed To Be A Symbol Of His Love. More Rubies, More Love. But I Could Not Wear It Comfortably. I Could Not Wear It At All. So Here Is The Point Of Everything I Have Been Trying To Say. If I Were To Give A Bracelet To You, Now, I Would Measure Your Wrist Twice

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 It Beautiful And Fair, To Live A Once-removed Life, In A World Once-removed From The One In Which Everyone Else Seemed To Exist.

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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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We Looked At Each Other Until It Felt Like Everything Would Burst Into Flames

Please Be Truthful, But Also Please Be Benevolent, Please.

Memories Are Small Prayers To God, If We Believed In That Sort Of Thing.

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But I Dig Negroes. I Dig Them All The Way.

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Succotash My Balzac, Dipshiitake.

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Each Day Has Been Chained To The Previous One. But The Weeks Have Wings. Anyone Who Believes That A Second Is Faster Than A Decade Did Not Live My Life.

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Sometimes I Can Feel My Bones Straining Under The Weight Of All The Lives I'm Not Living.

I Would Have Done Anything For Him. Maybe That Was My Sickness.

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She Wrote, I Wish I Could Be A Girl Again, With A Chance To Live My Life Again. I Have Suffered So Much More Than I Needed To. And The Joys I Have Felt Have Not Always Been Joyous. I Could Have Lived Differently.

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Oskar Schell: If The Sun Were To Explode, You Wouldn't Even Know About It For 8 Minutes Because Thats How Long It Takes For Light To Travel To Us. For Eight Minutes The World Would Still Be Bright And It Would Still Feel Warm. It Was A Year Since My Dad Died And I Could Feel My Eight Minutes With Him... Were Running Out.

It Is Not A Thing That You Can Imagine. It Only Is. After That, There Can Be No Imagining.

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It Would Be Refreshing To Have A Politician Try To Defend Guns Without Any Reference To The Second Amendment, But On The Merits Of Guns.

Second Amendment

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Love Me, Because Love Doesn't Exist, And I Have Tried Everything That Does.

Everything Is Illuminated

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I Saw Herschel And He Saw Me And We Stood Next To Each Other Because That Is What Friends Do In The Presence Of Evil Or Love.

Do You Have Any Coffee?'...'it Stunts My Growth, And I'm Afraid Of Death.

Afraid Of Death

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I Wasn’t Trying To Invent Better And Better Homes, But To Show Her That Homes Didn’t Matter, We Could Live In Any Home, In Any City, In Any Country, In Any Century, And Be Happy, As If The World Were Just What We Lived In.

I Shook My Tambourine The Whole Time, Because It Helped Me Remember That Even Though I Was Going Through Different Neighborhoods, I Was Still Me.

Yesterday I Wanted To Turn Inside Out.

Which, Then, Brings Us Closer To What We Want To Communicate: Saying What We Intend, Or Trying To Say The Opposite?

Songs Are As Sad As The Listener.

Everything Is The Way It Is Because Everything Was The Way It Was

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.

The More Exposure People Have To The Realities Of Factory Farming, The More We Will See People Rejecting It. It's Already Happening.

And Yet And Yet - The Last Secret Of The Tree Of Codes Is That Nothing Can Ever Reach A Definite Conclusion. Nowhere As Much As There Do We Feel Possibilities Shaken By The Nearness Of Realization. The Atmosphere Becomes Possibilities And We Shall Wander And Make A Thousand Mistakes. We Shall Wander Along Yet Not Be Able To Understand.

She Brushed Her Eyelashes Against His Chest.

I Wouldn't Want A Boy To Think I Was Pretty Unless He Was The Kind Of Boy Who Thought I Was Pretty.

When You Look Up 'hilarious' In The Dictionary, There's A Picture Of You.

I Was More Alone Than If I Had Been Alone.

Sadness Of Love Without Release.

Look, Taste Is Clearly The Crudest Of Our Senses: This Is Scientifically, Objectively Factual. It Is Less Nuanced. Eyesight Is Extraordinary - Hearing, Touch. I Find People Who Devote Their Whole Lives To Taste A Little Strange.

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

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.

She Spent An Afternoon Staring At Their Front Door. Waiting For Someone? Yankel Asked. What Color Is This? He Stood Very Close To The Door, Letting The End Of His Nose Touch The Peephole. He Licked The Wood And Joked, It Certainly Tastes Like Red. Yes, It Is Red, Isn't It? Seems So. She Buried Her Head In Her Hands. But Couldn't It Be Just A Bit More Red?

Because It Was Starting To Get Dark, And Because The Streets Were Crowded, I Bumped Into A Googolplex People. Who Were They? Where Were They Going? What Were They Looking For? I Wanted To Hear Their Heartbeats, And I Wanted Them To Hear Mine.

The Paper, The Stapler, The Staples, The Tape. It Makes Me Sick. Physical Things. Forty Years Of Loving Someone Becomes Staples And Tape.

Books Are For Those Without Real Lives, He Thought. And They Are No Real Replacement.

We Are Being Very Nomadic With The Truth, Yes?

I Wanted To Touch Him, To Tell Him That Even If Everyone Left Everyone, I Would Never Leave Him, He Talked And Talked, His Words Fell Through Him, Trying To Find The Floor To His Sadness.

Life Is Scarier Than Death.

I Wanted To Hit Him. I Wanted To Hold Him. I Wanted To Shout Myself Into His Ear.

What's So Horrible About Being Dead Forever, And Not Feeling Anything, And Not Even Dreaming? What's So Great About Feeling And Dreaming?

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?

It Shouldn't Be The Consumer's Responsibility To Figure Out What's Cruel And What's Kind, What's Environmentally Destructive And What's Sustainable. Cruel And Destructive Food Products Should Be Illegal. We Don't Need The Option Of Buying Children's Toys Made With Lead Paint, Or Aerosols With Chlorofluorocarbons, Or Medicines With Unlabeled Side Effects. And We Don't Need The Option Of Buying Factory-farmed Animals.

Or Maybe What He Fears Is Just The Opposite: That Nobody Is Looking; That His Death, Like His Life, Is Without Purpose; That There Is Neither Greater Good Nor Evil--only People Living And Dying Because Their Bodies Function And Then Do Not; That The Universe Is A Rip.

As I've Grown Older, I've Grown More Convinced There's Nothing That Shouldn't Be Talked About. If We Think We're Protecting Each Other, We're Not.

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.

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?

Words Are Capable Of Making Experience More Vivid, And Also Of Organizing It. They Can Scare Us, And They Can Comfort Us.

I Am Doing Something I Hate For You. This Is What It Means To Be In Love.

Do You Eat Chicken Because You Are Familiar With The Scientific Literature On Them And Have Decided That Their Suffering Doesn't Matter, Or Do You Do It Because It Tastes Good?

Sometimes You Have To Put Your Fears In Order.

Why Didn't I Learn To Treat Everything Like It Was The Last Time. My Greatest Regret Was How Much I Believed In The Future.

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.

This Is Love, She Thought, Isn't It? When You Notice Someone's Absence And Hate That Absence More Than Anything? More, Even, Than You Love His Presence?

Everything Is Illuminated

I Made Up My Mind That Nothing,, Nothing Was Going To Stop Me Not Even Me.

It Was Inevitable: Yankel Fell In Love With His Never-wife. He Would Wake From Sleep To Miss The Weight That Never Depressed 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 Rememberences That Much More Convincing And His Pain That Much More Real.

And She Would Say, "today You Believe In God?" And He Would Say, "today I Believe In Love".

I Hated Myself For Going, Why Couldn't I Be The Kind Of Person Who Stays?

How Did Her Life Live Itself Without Her.

The Dissolution Of A Family, Global Crisis Creates The Massive Fracture, Not Only In The Middle East But Between America And Israel, Between Europe And Israel, Between American Jews And Israeli Jews. The Distances Seem To Be Widening Wherever You Look.

I Never Confused What I Had With What I Was.

We Need A Better Way To Talk About Eating Animals. We Need A Way That Brings Meat To The Center Of Public Discussion In The Same Way It Is Often At The Center Of Our Plates. This Doesn't Require That We Pretend We Are Going To Have A Collective Agreement. However Strong Our Intuitions Are About What's Right For Us Personally And Even About What's Right For Others, We All Know In Advance That Our Positions Will Clash With Those Of Our Neighbors. What Do We Do With That Most Inevitable Reality? Drop The Conversation, Or Find A Way To Reframe It?

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.

If We Communicated With Something Like Music, We Would Never Be Misunderstood, Because There Is Nothing In Music To Understand...... But Until We Find This New Way Of Speaking, Until We Can Find A Nonapproximate Vocabulary, Nonsense Words Are The Best Thing We've Got. Ifactifice Is One Such Word.

But I Knew The Truth And That's Why I Was So Sad. Every Moment Before This One Depends On This One. Everything In The History Of The World Can Be Proven Wrong In One Moment.

I Ran Rather Than Walked, Anxious To Lose My Way. All I Wanted Was To Be Unsure.

Your Dad Didn't Die, So I Won't Be Able To Explain It To You.

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.

I Imagine A Line, A White Line, Painted On The Sand And On The Ocean, From Me To You.

Long Distance Relationship

Years Were Passing Through The Spaces Between Moments.

I Wanted To Protect Him, Which I Was Sure I Could Do, Even If I Could Not Protect Myself.

I Felt Suddenly Shy. I Was Not Used To Shy. I Was Used To Shame. Shyness Is When You Turn Your Head Away From Something You Want. Shame Is When You Turn Your Head Away From Something You Do Not Want.

I'm Sorry For My Inability To Let Unimportant Things Go, For My Inability To Hold On To The Important Things.

Unimportant Things

Ninety-nine Percent Of All Land Animals Eaten Or Used To Produce Milk And Eggs In The United States Are Factory Farmed. So Although There Are Important Exceptions, To Speak About Eating Animals Today Is To Speak About Factory Farming.

...there Are Only Some Many Times You Can Utter "it Does Not Hurt" Before It Begins To Hurt Even More Than The Hurt.

[s]o If The Device Of The Person In The Ambulance Detected The Device Of The Person He Loved The Most, Or The Person Who Loved Him The Most, And The Person In The Ambulance Was Really Badly Hurt, And Might Even Die, The Ambulance Could Flash Goodbye! I Love You! Goodbye! I Love You!

I Try Not To Remember The Life That I Didn’t Want To Lose But Lost And Have To Remember

I Can't Even Say 'hair Pie,'' I Told Him, 'unless I'm Talking About An Actual Pie Made Out Of Rabbits.

Why Are You Leaving Me? 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 Some Things I Wanted To Tell Him. But I Knew They Would Hurt Him. So I Buried Them And Let Them Hurt Me

My Greatest Fear Is Feeling Like A Professional Novelist. Somebody Who Creates Characters, Who Sits Down And Has Pieces Of Paper Taped To The Wall - What's Going To Happen In This Scene, Or This Act. What I Like Is For It To Be A Much More Scary, Sloppy Reflection Of Who I Am.

We Shared The Smile Of Recognizing Ourselves In Each Other.

We Talked About Nothing In Particular, But It Felt Like We Were Talking About The Most Important Things.

[grandfather] Would Manufacture Funnies With Grandmother Before She Died About How He Was In Love With Other Women Who Were Not Her. She Knew It Was Only Funnies Because She Would Laugh In Volumes. 'anna,' He Would Say, 'i Am Going To Marry That One With The Pink Hat.' And She Would Say, 'to Whom Are You Going To Marry Her?' And He Would Say, 'to Me.' I Would Laugh Very Much In The Back Seat, And She Would Say To Him, 'but You Are No Priest.' And He Would Say, 'i Am Today.' And She Would Say, 'today You Believe In God?' And He Would Say, 'today I Believe In Love.

It’s A Rule That We Never Listen To Sad Music, We Made That Rule Early On, Songs Are As Sad As The Listener, We Hardly Ever Listen To Music.

Humans Are The Only Animals That Have Children On Purpose, Keep In Touch (or Don't), Care About Birthdays, Waste And Lose Time, Brush Their Teeth, Feel Nostalgia, Scrub Stains, Have Religions And Political Parties And Laws, Wear Keepsakes, Apologize Years After An Offense, Whisper, Fear Themselves, Interpret Dreams, Hide Their Genitalia, Shave, Bury Time Capsules, And Can Choose Not To Eat Something For Reasons Of Conscience. The Justifications For Eating Animals And For Not Eating Them Are Often Identical: We Are Not Them.

He Was Someone Whom Everyone Admired And Liked But Whom Nobody Knew. He Was Like A Book That You Could Feel Good Holding, That You Could Talk About Without Ever Having Read, That You Could Recommend.

Sometimes I Can Hear My Bones Straining Under The Weight Of All The Lives I'm Not Living.

We Burned With Love For Ourselves, All Of Us, Starters Of The Fire We Suffered- Our Love Was The Affliction For Which Only Our Love Was The Cure.

I 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?

If Nothing Matters, There's Nothing To Save.

Nothing Matters

When I Heard Your Organization Was Recording Testimonies, I Knew I Had To Come. She Died In My Arms, Saying 'i Don't Want To Die.' That Is What Death Is Like. It Doesn't Matter What Uniforms The Soldiers Are Wearing. It Doesn't Matter How Good The Weapons Are. I Thought If Everyone Could See What I Saw, We Would Never Have War Anymore.

I Am Not Sad, He Would Repeat To Himself Over And Over, I Am Not Sad. As If He Might One Day Convince Himself. Or Fool Himself. Or Convince Others -- The Only Thing Worse Than Being Sad Is For Others To Know That You Are Sad.

Why Didn't He Say Goodbye? I Gave Myself A Bruise. Why Didn't He Say 'i Love You'?

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Juan Ramon Jimenez

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