Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes About Giving

Quotes about: Giving

• 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.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Love, Wall, Fall

  "Everything Is Illuminated". Book by Jonathan Safran Foer, 2002.

• 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

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Giving, Joy, Grandfather

• Literature was the only religion her father practiced, when a book fell on the floor he kissed it, when he was done with a book he tried to give it away to someone who would love it.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Father, Book, Giving

  Jonathan Safran Foer (2013). “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel”, p.114, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• What is suffering? I'm not sure what it is, but I know that suffering is the name we give to the origin of all the sighs, screams, and groans — small and large, crude and multifaceted — that concern us. The word defines our gaze even more than what we are looking at.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Names, Giving, Suffering

  "Eating Animals". Book by Jonathan Safran Foer, 2009.

• It is unrealistic to think you can have an inflexible identity that never has to give or take or make compromises.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Thinking, Giving, Identity

  Source: www.nydailynews.com

• Life is precious, so I ought to spend my days, you know, making sandwiches for homeless people and tending to the elderly in hospice care. Life is precious, so I should give everything away, except that I live in the world. And in the world, I actually have needs and wants, and I value my needs and wants. And I live in the world, and I can't just go make sandwiches every day because I also have to take kids to school. I also have to, you know, write books because that's my livelihood.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Book, School, Kids

  Source: www.npr.org

• 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.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Memories, Book, Law

  "Commentaries For A New American Passover Seder, Jonathan Safran Foer Presents New Haggadah", www.huffingtonpost.com. March 29, 2012.

• Everyone is always in need of something that another person can give, be it undivided attention, a kind word or deep empathy. There is no better use of a life than to be attentive to such needs.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Giving, Empathy, Use

  "How Not to Be Alone" by Jonathan Safran Foer, www.nytimes.com. June 8, 2013.

• We live in a world made up more of story than stuff. We are creatures of memory more than reminders, of love more than likes. Being attentive to the needs of others might not be the point of life, but it is the work of life. It can be messy, and painful, and almost impossibly difficult. But it is not something we give. It is what we get in exchange for having to die.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Memories, Giving, Might

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