Top 100 Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes
#1. It's rarely talked about, but hunting for sport is just about as vile as we humans get.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#2. I felt shame for living in a nation of unprecedented prosperity-a nation that spends a smaller percentage of income on food than any other civilization has in human history-but in the name of affordability treats the animals it eats with cruelty so extreme it would be illegal if inflicted on a dog.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#4. I do not love famous nightclubs. They make me feel very cheerless and abandoned. Am I applying that word correctly? Abandoned?
Jonathan Safran Foer
#5. It made me start to wonder if there were other people so lonely so close. I thought about "Eleanor Rigby." It's true, where do they all come from? And where do they all belong?
Jonathan Safran Foer
#6. I always write out of a need to read something, rather than a need to write something.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#7. She always saw through him, as if he were just another window. She always felt that she knew everything about him that could be known. Not that he was simple, but that he was knowable, like a list of errands, like an encyclopedia.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#8. Sometimes my hand starts to burn and I am convinced we are writing the same word at the same moment.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#9. Later that year, when snow started to hide the front steps, when morning became evening as I sat on the sofa, buried under everything I'd lost, I made a fire and used my laughter for kindling: "Ha ha ha!" "Ha ha ha!" "Ha ha ha!
Jonathan Safran Foer
#10. It was not the feeling of completeness I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#11. 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.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#12. More than any set of practices, factory farming is a mind-set: reduce production costs to the absolute minimum and systematically ignore or "externalize" such costs as environmental degradation, human disease, and animal suffering.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#13. But that slip of paper wouldn't disappear, ever, and neither would the image of his prostrate wife, and neither would the thought that if he could, it might greatly improve his life to end it.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#18. What about that five-foot-four woman, who never inflicted physical or emotional violence, or even saw a punishment all the way through, terrified her husband and children to the point of unconditional surrender? Jacob
Jonathan Safran Foer
#21. 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.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#23. Every factory-farmed animal is, as a practice, treated in ways that would be illegal if it were a dog or a cat.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#24. Everything is the way it is because everything was the way it was. Sometimes I feel ensnared in this, as if no matter what I do, what will come has already been fixed.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#25. I have been waiting for you for so long."
I pointed to the car. "We are searching for Trachimbrod."
"Oh," she said and she released a river of tears. "You are here. I am it.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#26. At the end of my dream, Eve put the apple back on the branch. The tree went back into the ground. It became a sapling, which became a seed.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#27. 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.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#28. How could this world be so unlike the world that I believed I was living in? I can't describe it. Do I not want to describe it, or do I simply not possess the vocabulary?
Jonathan Safran Foer
#29. Because they were young. Because one is young only once in a life lived only once. Because recklessness is the only fist to throw at nothingness. How much aliveness can one bear?
Jonathan Safran Foer
#31. There is something about eating animals that tends to polarize: never eat them or never sincerely question eating them; become an activist or disdain activists.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#32. 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?
Jonathan Safran Foer
#33. Once you hear something, you can never return to the time before you heard it.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#35. Jews have a special relationship to books, and the Haggadah has been translated more widely, and reprinted more often, than any other Jewish book. It is not a work of history or philosophy, not a prayer book, user's manual, timeline, poem or palimpsest - and yet it is all these things.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#36. I usually write away from home, in coffee shops, on trains, on planes, in friends' houses. I like places where there's stuff going on that you can lift your eyes, see something interesting, overhear a conversation.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#37. They'd lost their way, and lost their compass, but not their belief that it was possible to get back - even if neither knew exactly what happiness she was referring to. The
Jonathan Safran Foer
#38. 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?
Jonathan Safran Foer
#39. When I looked at you, my life made sense. Even the bad things made sense. They were necessary to make you possible.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#41. He chose illness, because he knew of no other way to be seen. Not even by those looking at him.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#42. Even if Lady Macbeth could have removed that damn spot, wouldn't her hands have been red from all of the scrubbing?
Jonathan Safran Foer
#44. It strange how upset people get about a few dozen baseball players taking growth hormones, when we're doing what we're doing to our food animals and feeding them to our children?
Jonathan Safran Foer
#45. And how can you say I love you to someone you love? I rolled onto my side and fell asleep next to her. Here is the point of everything I have been trying to tell you, Oskar. It's always necessary.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#46. 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?
Jonathan Safran Foer
#47. I looked at everyone and wondered where they came from, and who they missed, and what they were sorry for.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#51. There are only some many times you can utter "It does not hurt" before it begins to hurt even more than the hurt.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#52. So many days in their shared life. So many experiences. How had they managed to spend the previous sixteen years unlearning each other?
Jonathan Safran Foer
#53. I first became a vegetarian when I was nine, in response to an argument made by a radical babysitter. My great change - which lasted a couple of weeks - was based on the very simple instinct that it's wrong to kill animals for food.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#54. 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.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#55. I loved having a dad who was smarter than the New York Times, and I loved how my cheek could feel the hairs on his chest through his T-shirt, and how he always smelled like shaving, even at the end of the day. Being with him made my brain quiet. I didn't have to invent a thing.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#59. Can't you even tell me if I'm on the right track?" Buckminster purred, and Dad shrugged his shoulders again. "But if you don't tell me anything, how can I ever be right?" He circled something in an article and said, "Another way of looking at it would be, how could you ever be wrong?
Jonathan Safran Foer
#60. I write because I want to end my loneliness. Books make people less alone. That, before and after everything else, is what books do. They show us that conversations are possible across distances.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#61. I missed you even when I was with you. That's been my problem. I miss what I already have, and I surround myself with things that are missing.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#62. Another reason it would be a good invention is that there are so many times when you know you're feeling a lot of something, but you don't know what the something is.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#63. On average, Americans eat the equivalent of 21,000 entire animals in a lifetime - one
Jonathan Safran Foer
#64. Shame is the work of memory against forgetting. Shame is what we feel when we almost entirely - yet not entirely - forget social expectations and our obligations to others in favor of our immediate gratification.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#65. You can make great meals without meat that are, of course, much more healthy for the same price, but it takes a process of reeducation, just because Americans aren't familiar with how to cook vegetables anymore.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#66. I'd experienced joy, but not nearly enough, could there be enough? The end of suffering does not justify the suffering, and so there is no end to suffering, what a mess I am, I thought, what a fool, how foolish and narrow, how worthless, how pinched and pathetic, how helpless.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#67. It stayed with him, like a part of him, like a birthmark, like a limb, it was on him, in him, him, his hymn: I had to do it for myself.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#68. 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.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#69. The older one gets, the harder it is to account for time. Children ask: "Are we there yet?" Adults: "How did we get here so quickly?" Somehow,
Jonathan Safran Foer
#70. YOU WILL DRINK THE COFFEE UNTIL I CAN SEE MY FACE IN THE BOTTOM OF THE CUP!" I did not mean to roar. "But it's a clay cup." "I DO NOT CARE!" He finished the coffee. "You did not have to finish it," I said, because I could perceive that he was rebuilding the Great Wall of China with shit bricks.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#71. 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.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#72. The more you love someone, he came to think, the harder it is to tell them. It surprised him that strangers didn't stop each other on the street to say I love you.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#73. And the general shot my sister. I could not look at her, but I remember the sound of when she hit the ground. I hear that sound when things hit the ground still. Anything.' If I could, I would make it so nothing ever hit the ground again.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#75. I said, 'I need to know how he died.'
He flipped back and pointed at, 'Why?'
So I can stop inventing how he died. I'm always inventing.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#76. We could retell our stories and make them better, more representational or aspirational. Or we could choose to tell different stories. The world itself had another chance.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#77. It's a shame that we have to live, but it's a tragedy that we get to live only one life.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#78. We have waged war, or rather let a war be waged, against all of the animals we eat. This war is new and has a name: factory farming.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#83. He enclosed pieces of string that he used to measure out his body
his head, thigh, forearm, finger, neck, everything. He wanted me to sleep with them under my pillow. He said that when he came back, we would remeasure his body against the string as proof that he hadn't changed.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#86. He wrote, You're being crazy. You're going to catch a cold.
I already have a cold.
You are going to catch a colder.
I could not believe he was making a joke. And I could not believe I laughed.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#87. I didn't intend to write about totems or people searching. I tried not to constrain myself, and this is what I ended up with. There's this great Auden quote: "I look at what I write so I can see what I think."
Jonathan Safran Foer
#88. You used to write such honest books. Honest and emotionally ambitious. Maybe they weren't finding millions of readers. Maybe they weren't making you rich. But they were making the world rich
Jonathan Safran Foer
#89. Maybe that's what a person's personality is: the difference between the inside and outside.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#92. 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?
Jonathan Safran Foer
#93. You do not have to utter anything you do not want to utter," I told her, and she said, "Then I would never utter another word again." "You do not have to do anything that you do not want to do." "Then I would never do anything again.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#94. I kept thinking how they were all names of dead people, and how names are basically the only thing dead people keep.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#95. Silence can be as irrepressible as laughter. And it can accumulate, like weightless snowflakes. It can collapse a ceiling. "I'm not sure," Julia said. Jacob
Jonathan Safran Foer
#96. You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#97. [ ... ] he felt that he too was only a baby, with the chance to live without shame, without the need for consolation for a life lived wrong, a chance to be again innocent, simply and impossibly happy.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#98. Dear Anna, we will live in a home with no walls, so that everywhere we go will be our home.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#99. We are breeding creatures incapable of surviving in any place other than the most artificial settings. We have focused the awesome power of modern genetic knowledge to bring into being animals that suffer more.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#100. If we are not given the option to live without violence, we are given the choice to center our meals around harvest or slaughter, husbandry or war. We have chosen slaughter. We have chosen war. That's the truest version of our story of eating animals.
Can we tell a new story?
Jonathan Safran Foer
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