Jonathan Safran FoerShe was like a drowning person, flailing, reaching for anything that might save her. Her life was an urgent, desperate struggle to justify her life.
About This Quote
It’s been a long time since I read this, but when I did it was in a book by John Knowles called “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.” He was describing a character in the book named Francie Nolan, who worked at a sweatshop in an old tenement house. One day, she saw a man being assaulted on the street. She ran out of the building and tried to help him, but he was dying and his attacker had already left. In desperation, she clung to him and whispered something in his ear.
When he died, the police took her in for questioning. She told them she had been comforting him, but later she realized that what she had said to him had been really important to him. It helped him find his greatness; whatever he did with his life he could never be too great to tell her.
So she didn’t feel bad about lying to the police; she knew what was best for everyone concerned.
Source: Everything Is Illuminated
Some Similar Quotes
- I would always rather be happy than dignified.
- It is better to lose your pride with someone you love rather than to lose that someone you love with your useless pride.
- Thus with my lips have I denounced you, while my heart, bleeding within me, called you tender names. It was love lashed by its own self that spoke. It was pride half slain that fluttered in the dust. It was my hunger for your love...
- It often occurs that pride and selfishness are muddled with strength and independence. They are neither equal nor similar; in fact, they are polar opposites. A coward may be so cowardly that he masks his weakness with some false personification of power. He is afraid...
- You are mistaken, Mr. Darcy, if you suppose that the mode of your declaration affected me in any other way, than as it spared the concern which I might have felt in refusing you, had you behaved in a more gentlemanlike manner." (Elizabeth Bennett)
More Quotes By Jonathan Safran Foer
- One must pray first, but afterwards one must help oneself. God does not care for cowards.--" Wanda
- Death had been more pitiful to them than longer life would have been. It had taken the one in the loyalty of love, and the other in the innocence of faith, from a world which for love has no recompense and for faith no fulfillment.
- There are wrongs for which religion makes no provision, and of which it has no comprehension.--" Wanda
- Woman's fatal weakness is to desire sympathy and comprehension.--" Wanda
- I do not wish to be a coward like the father of mankind and throw the blame upon a woman.