Top 100 Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes
#1. When you live in Brooklyn, if you throw a rock, you'll hit a writer - Jonathan Safran Foer, Jonathan Lethem, Paul Auster.
Libba Bray
#2. 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
#6. They hadn't forgotten but accommodated ... So nothing was done. No decisions were made ... They waited like fools, they sat on their hands like fools, and spoke, like fools ... They waited to die, and we cannot blame them, because we would do the same, we do do the same.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#7. I thought he had to look for what he was looking for, and realize it no longer existed, or never existed. p. 233
Jonathan Safran Foer
#8. Do you have any coffee?' ... 'It stunts my growth, and I'm afraid of death.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#10. [ ... ] but I believe that things are extremely complicated, and her looking over me was as complicated as anything could ever be. But it was also incredibly simple.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#11. THE PROBLEM OF GOOD: WHY UNCONDITIONALLY GOOD THINGS HAPPEN TO UNCONDITIONALLY BAD PEOPLE
(SEE GOD)
Jonathan Safran Foer
#12. Sometimes people who seem good end up being not as good as you might have hoped, you know?
Jonathan Safran Foer
#13. He talked and talked, his words fell through him, trying to find the floor of his sadness.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#14. You had a talk? You think talk got us out of Egypt or Entebbe? Uh-uh. Plague and Uzis. Talk gets you a good place in line for a shower that isn't a shower.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#15. Because he had been waiting for someone to come back to him, so every time someone knocked on the door, he couldn't stop himself from hoping it might be that person, even though he knew he shouldn't hope.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#18. 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
#19. Something having been done just about everywhere just about always is no kind of justification for doing it now.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#20. I made up my mind that nothing,, nothing was going to stop me Not even me.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#21. It was not the feeling of completeness I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#22. Every time I left our apartment to go searching for the lock, I became a little lighter, because I was getting closer to Dad. But I also became a little heavier, because I was getting farther from Mom.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#23. Animal agriculture is now dominated by the factory farm- 99.9% of chickens raised for meat, 97% of laying hens, 99% of turkeys, 95% of pigs, and 78% of cattle.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#24. It is not a thing that you can imagine. It only is. After that, there can be no imagining.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#25. 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
#26. What's weird," I said, "is that I've never seen you cry." He said, "I cry all the time.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#27. It's the tragedy of loving, you can't love anything more than something you miss.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#29. In my dream, spring came after summer, came after fall, came after winter, came after spring.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#30. Flea-Market vendors are frozen mid-haggle. Middle-aged women are frozen in the middle of their lives. The gavels of frozen judges are frozen between guilt and innocence. On the ground are the crystals of the frozen first breaths of babies, and those of the last gasps of the dying.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#31. War! We go on killing each other to no purpose! It is war waged by humanity against humanity, and it will only end when there's no one left to fight.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#32. My test for writing is always, is this fun or does it feel like a job? Is it moving me? Or am I just fulfilling my own expectations - or even worse, somebody else's?
Jonathan Safran Foer
#34. Food ethics are so complex because food is bound to both taste buds and taste, to individual biographies and social histories.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#35. I asked her why she was getting so upset about such a small thing. She said, 'It doesn't feel small to me.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#36. I am not a bad person. I am a good person who has lived in a bad time.
Alex's grandfather..Everything is Illuminated
Jonathan Safran Foer
#37. Nothing embarrassed her. I admired that so much, because everything embarrassed me, and that hurt me.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#38. Why didn't he say goodbye?
I gave myself a bruise.
Why didn't he say 'I love you'?
Jonathan Safran Foer
#39. She said, "Do you have more things that you need, or more that you don't need?" I said, "It depends on what it means to need.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#40. Sometimes my hand starts to burn and I am convinced we are writing the same word at the same moment.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#41. 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
#42. Jacob was right when, after Sam's injury, he said it was too much love for happiness.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#44. Kein briere iz oich a breire. Not to have a choice is also a choice. How will we tell the story of he who never had no choice? At stake is our notion of righteousness, of a life worth saving.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#45. And when she said, Father, I love you, she was neither naive nor dishonest, but the opposite: she was wise and truthful enough to lie.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#47. And there was shame in being human: the shame of knowing that twenty of the roughly thirty-five classified species of sea horse worldwide are threatened with extinction because they are killed "unintentionally" in seafood production.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#48. We aren't exactly emptying the oceans; it's more like clear-cutting a forest with thousands of species to create massive fields with one type of soybean.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#49. Does it break my heart, of course, every moment of every day, into more pieces than my heart was made of ...
Jonathan Safran Foer
#51. She has become an expert at confusing what is with what was with what should be with what could be.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#52. I do not love famous nightclubs. They make me feel very cheerless and abandoned. Am I applying that word correctly? Abandoned?
Jonathan Safran Foer
#53. Also, I designed a pretty fascinating bracelet, where you put a rubber band around your favorite book of poems for a year, and then you take it off and wear it.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#54. I invented a book that listed every word in every language. It wouldn't be a very useful book, but you could hold it and know that everything you could possibly say was in your hands.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#56. I said I kicked a French chicken in the stomach once." "Huh?" "It said, 'Oeuf.'" "What is that?" "It's a joke. Do you want to hear another, or have you already had un oeuf?
Jonathan Safran Foer
#58. I tried to think about other things. I tried to invent optimistic inventions. But the pessimistic ones were extremely loud.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#59. I don't think that there are any limits to how excellent we could make life seem.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#60. My insides don't match up with my outsides. -Do anyone's inside and outsides match up? -I don't know. I'm only me. -Maybe that's what a person's personality is: the difference between the inside and the outside.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#61. It's nice to believe that when confronted with facts people will just suddenly respond to them but, in fact, most people don't really work like that.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#62. 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
#63. (..) she cried and cried and cried, there weren't any napkins nearby so I ripped the page from the book - "I don't speak. I'm sorry." - and used it to dry her cheeks, my explanation and apology ran down her face like mascara (..)
Jonathan Safran Foer
#66. Brod's life was a slow realisation that the world was not for her, and that for whatever reason, she would never be happy and honest at the same time.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#67. Laughed with him over black coffee, cried with him over yellowing pictures, talked greenly about having kids of her own,
Jonathan Safran Foer
#68. It was not the Jew, of course, who invented the love poem, but the other way around.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#72. there's going to come a time when we won't speak for days on end." "There won't." "There will. Every parent thinks it will never happen to them, but it happens to everyone.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#74. 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
#76. It's rarely talked about, but hunting for sport is just about as vile as we humans get.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#77. 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.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#78. At first I thought I'd walked into a tree, but then that tree became a person, who was also recovering on the ground, and then I saw that it was her and she saw that it was me ...
Jonathan Safran Foer
#80. 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
#81. How do children do that? Jacob wondered. Not only enter rooms silently, but at the worst possible moment.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#83. Weeks passed like boats waiting to sail into the starless dawn, we were full of aimless endless darkness.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#85. 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.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#86. While it is always possible to wake a person who's sleeping, no amount of noise will wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#88. I beg you, no matter what happens, no matter where you go in life or how many millions you make, no matter anything, I beg you: never buy a German car.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#89. She was with me. She did all of those things and so many more, things I would never tell anyone, and she never even loved me. Now that's love.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#90. 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.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#91. I always write out of a need to read something, rather than a need to write something.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#92. I'm deeply curious about Jewish things. I've toyed around with the idea of going to rabbinical school.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#94. Death is the only thing in life that you absolutely have to be aware of as it's happening.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#95. She said I could have a seat on the couch if I wanted to, but I told her I didn't believe in leather, so I stood.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#96. Anyone who believes that a second is faster than a decade did not live life.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#97. Parents are always more knowledgeable than their children, and children are always smarter than their parents.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#98. It's not worth getting too excited about thinking about the larger picture. The larger picture doesn't come into focus for an awfully long time.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#99. Sofiowka was found the next morning, swinging by the neck from the wooden bridge. His severed hands were hanging from strings tied to his feet, and across his chest was written, in Brod's red lipstick, ANIMAL
Jonathan Safran Foer
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