"Words never mean what we want them to mean."

Jonathan Safran Foer Literature See all quotes by Jonathan Safran Foer →

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“Stalin found out about the community and sent his thugs in, just a few days before I got there, to break all of their arms! That was worse than killing them! It was a horrible sight, Oskar: their arms in crude splints, straight in front of them like zombies! They couldn't feed themselves, because they couldn't get their hands to their mouths! So you know what they did!" "They starved?" "They fed each other! That's the difference between heaven and hell! In hell we starve! In heaven we feed each other!" I don't believe in the afterlife." "Neither do I, but I believe in the story.”

“There were things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him, so I buried them, and let them hurt me.”

“Accepting the compromise of the way we have been, the way we are, and the way we will likely be... may we live together in unwavering love and good health, amen.”

“He had a wall of masks from every country he‘d been to, like Armenia and Chile and Ethiopia. It‘s not a horrible world, he told me, but it‘s filled with a lot of horrible people.”

“You do not have to present not-truths to me, Sasha. I am not a child.”

“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 could never have war anymore.”

Resonant Thoughts

"The analytical approach employed by both BSP and BISC is "top down". The implications of the words "top down" are multiple and varied, and all apply to these analysis. For instance:"

— John Zachman

Business1934

#writing

"The colors that a speaker "sees" often depend very much on the language he speaks, because each language offers its own high-codability color terms."

— Peter Farb

Science1929–1980

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"Suffering, sad "female humanity!" What are these feelings which they are taught to consider as disgraceful, to deny to themselves? What form do the Chinese feet assume when denied their proper develop…"

— Florence Nightingale

Medicine1820–1910

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"“We’re still the Black Company. We still don’t leave our own behind.” Which was never strictly true but you do have to serve an ideal the best you can, lest it become debased. A law as ancient as coin…"

— Glen Cook

Literature1944

#justice