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(..) 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
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
Ninety-nine percent of all land animals eaten or used to produce milk and eggs in the United States are factory farmed. So although there are important exceptions, to speak about eating animals today is to speak about factory farming. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
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
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
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
Food serves two parallel purposes: it nourishes and it helps you remember. Eating and storytelling are inseparable - the saltwater is also tears; the honey not only tastes sweet, but makes us think of sweetness; the matzo is the bread of our affliction. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
In my dream, spring came after summer, came after fall, came after winter, came after spring. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
A few days after we came home from the hospital, I sent a letter to a friend, including a photo of my son and some first impressions of fatherhood. He responded, simply, 'Everything is possible again.' It was the perfect thing to write because that was exactly how it felt. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
Choosing leaf or flesh, factory farm or family farm, does not in itself change the world, but teaching ourselves, our children, our local communities, and our nation to choose conscience over ease can. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
Let love write on you for awhile. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
The purpose of the Seder to my mind is to inspire conversations with your family about the human drama and hopefully transmit values to the next generation. I've always felt like this could be better. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
He was someone whom everyone admired and liked but whom nobody knew. He was like a book that you could feel good holding, that you could talk about without ever having read, that you could recommend. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
The horse at the bottom of the river, shrouded by the sunken night sky, closed its heavy eyes. The prehistoric ant in Yankel's ring, which had lain motionless in the honey-colored amber since long before Noah hammered the first plank, hid its head between its many legs, in shame. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
She avoids mirrors, and lifts a powerful telescope to find herself. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
In my dream, people apologized for things that were about to happen, and lit candles by inhaling. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Or maybe what he fears is just the opposite: that nobody is looking; that his death, like his life, is without purpose; that there is neither greater good nor evil
only people living and dying because their bodies function and then do not; that the universe is a rip. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I did not need to know if he could love me.
I needed to know if he could need me. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Deep down, the young are lonelier than the old.' I read that in a book somewhere and it's stuck in my head. Maybe it's true. Maybe it's not true. More likely, the young and the old are lonely in different ways, in their own ways ... -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
The paper, the stapler, the staples, the tape. It makes me sick. Physical things. Forty years of loving someone becomes staples and tape. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Laughed with him over black coffee, cried with him over yellowing pictures, talked greenly about having kids of her own, -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I got tired, I told him. Not worn out, but worn through. Like one of those wives who wakes up one morning and says I can't bake any more bread. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
It's the tragedy of loving, you can't love anything more than something you miss. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
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
Eating a piece of meat, at its most efficient, we could say is like throwing away six times that amount of food every time you eat it because you're recycling all those calories through it. I know a lot of people who came to this issue not through animal welfare but through wastefulness. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
So many people enter and leave your life! Hundreds of thousands of people! You have to keep the door open so they can come in! But it also means you have to let them go! -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Time was passing like a hand waving from a train I wanted to be on.
I hope you never have to think about anything as much as I think about you. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
He saw what they either couldn't see or couldn't allow themselves to see, and that only made him more pissed, because being less stupid than one's parents is repulsive, like taking a gulp from a glass of milk that you thought was orange juice. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
The meaning of my thoughts started to float away from me, like leaves that fall from a tree into a river, I was the tree, the world was the river. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
He removed several pages of death certificates, which were picked up by another breeze and sent into the trees. Some would fall with the leaves that September. Some would fall with the trees generations later. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I'm sorry for my inability to let unimportant things go, for my inability to hold on to the important things. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I am very simple to enchant. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
She wants to know if I love her, that's all anyone wants from anyone else, not love itself but the knowledge that love is there, like new batteries in the flashlight in the emergency kit in the hall closet. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
It is my great hope that our paths, however long and winding, will cross again. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Blessings are just curses that other people envy. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Books are for those without real lives, he thought. And they are no real replacement. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
When you hide your face from the world, you can't see the world. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
SADNESSES OF THE COVENANT: Sadness of God's love; Sadness of God's back [sic]; Favourite-child sadness; Sadness of b[ein]g sad in front of one's God; Sadness of the opposite of belief [sic]; What if? Sadness; Sadness of God alone in heaven; Sadness of a God who would need people to pray to Him ... -- Jonathan Safran Foer
My father's face, when he said that, dissolved into a stillness, a sad expression, sadder than human feeling. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
At any given time, there are forty times in the world. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I will walk without noise and I will open the door in darkness and I will -- Jonathan Safran Foer
But even if the average life expectancy continued to increase by one year with each passing year, it would take forever for people to live forever, so probably no one would ever see it. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
One day you will do things for me that you hate. That is what it means to be family. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
The sky slowly pulled up its blue dress to reveal night. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
Despite all that had been spilled, was the cup still half full? Or did a crumb of Wellbutrin just lodge free from between his brain's teeth, offering a morsel of undigested happiness? The cup was half full enough. Despite -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I do not love famous nightclubs. They make me feel very cheerless and abandoned. Am I applying that word correctly? Abandoned? -- Jonathan Safran Foer
He wanted to say, "Just say, 'You're my writer.'" But -- Jonathan Safran Foer
It took me as long as I had known him to get rid of all of his words. Like turning an hourglass over. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Isn't it funny that if God were to reveal and explain Himself, the majority of the world would necessarily be disappointed? -- Jonathan Safran Foer
There are more places you haven't heard of then you're heard of!' I loved that -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Was his death an essential stage in the continuation of his life? -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Because it was starting to get dark, and because the streets were crowded, I bumped into a googolplex people. Who were they? Where were they going? What were they looking for? I wanted to hear their heartbeats, and I wanted them to hear mine. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
But it was unnecessary.
There would be other nights.
And how can you say I love you to someone you love?
I rolled on my side and fell asleep next to her.
Here is the point of everything I've been trying to tell you, Oskar.
It's always necessary.
I love you,
Grandma -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I imagine a line, a white line, painted on the sand and on the ocean, from me to you. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
We talked for hours, but we just kept repeating those same things over and over and over. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Fuck You!' [Oskar said] 'Exuse me!' [His mom said] 'Sorry. I mean, screw you.' 'You need a time-out!' 'I need a mausoleum! -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I don't mind if smiles come at my expense, I'm a small price to pay. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Mom told me, "It probably gets pretty lonely to be Grandma, don't you think?" I told her, "It probably gets pretty lonely to be anyone. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
It felt as if an only life should be better than good enough, but how many efforts for more have ended with having nothing? -- Jonathan Safran Foer
So what did Sammy do?" Irv asked, his mouth full of gluten. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
In America, millions of dogs and cats euthanized in animal shelters every year become the food for our food (twice as many such animals are euthanized as are adopted). -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
A map such as that one is worth many hundreds, and as luck will have it, thousands of dollars. But more than this, it is a remembrance of that time before our planet was so small. When this map was made, I thought, you could live without knowing where you were not living. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I'm interested in the kind of religion that makes life harder. I'm not so interested in the comforting kind of religion. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Murdering someone would surely prove that you are capable of killing, but it wouldn't be the most reasonable way to understand why you shouldn't do it. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
The moment before he started was my favorite moment. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Food for her is not food, it is terror, dignity, gratitude, vengeance, joyfulness, humiliation, religion, history, and, of course, love. As if the fruit she always offered us were picked from the destroyed brances of out family tree. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I desperately wish I had my tambourine with me now, because even after everything I'm still wearing heavy boots, and sometimes it helps to play a good beat -- Jonathan Safran Foer
He ran the back of his hand up her cheek, with the pretense of wiping away sweat. Do you think you could ever love me?
I don't think so.
Because I'm not good enough.
It's not like that.
Because I'm not smart.
No.
Because you couldn't love me.
Because I couldn't love you. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
The factory farm has succeeded by divorcing people from their food, eliminating farmers, and ruling agriculture by corporate fiat. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Objects that don't exist don't exist. If we were to imagine such a thing as an object that didn't exist, it would be that thing that God hated. This is the strongest argument against the nonbeliever. If God didn't exist, he would have to hate himself, and that is obviously nonsense. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
She was like a drowning person, flailing, reaching for anything that might save her. Her life was an urgent, desperate struggle to justify her life. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Look, taste is clearly the crudest of our senses: this is scientifically, objectively factual. It is less nuanced. Eyesight is extraordinary - hearing, touch. I find people who devote their whole lives to taste a little strange. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
As a writer, putting words on the page is how I pay attention. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
Some of the names I could not reason, like the box marked DARKNESS, or the one with DEATH OF THE FIRSTBORN written in pencil on its front. I noticed that there was a box on the top of one of these skyscrapers of boxes that was marked DUST -- Jonathan Safran Foer
August has passed, and yet summer continues by force to grow days. They sprout secretly between the chapters of the year, covertly included between its pages. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Once upon a time there was a person whose life was so good there was no story to tell about it. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
But I still couldn't figure out what it all meant. The more I found out, the less I understood. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
It was the feeling of not wanting to live in the world, even if it was the only place to live. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
It takes life to live life -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
Things were happening around us, but nothing was happening between us. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
We made safe places in the apartment where you could go and not exist. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
There are two kinds of sculptures. There's the kind that subtracts: Michelangelo starts with a block of marble and chips away. And then there is the kind that adds, building with clay, piling it on. The way I write novels is to keep piling on and piling on and piling on. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
The images of his infinite pasts and infinite futures washed over him as he waited, paralyzed, in the present. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Stephen Hawking won't come to Israel? I'm not one to punch a quadriplegic with glasses, but I'm sure he won't mind if we ask for his voice back - you know, the one that was created by Israeli engineers. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
One of the great things about art is you get to see what your concerns are, what those things tumbling around inside you are. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
When it comes to meat, change is almost always cast as an absolute. You are a vegetarian or you are not. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I have made efforts to make you appear as a person with less anxiety, as you have commanded me to do on so many occasions. This is difficult to achieve, because in truth you are a person with very much anxiety. Perhaps you should be a drug user. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
Sometimes I can feel my bones straining -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I want to talk about God in a literary way. But I think I would have a very hard time praying to God. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
It's an empowering idea. The entire goliath of the food industry is driven and determined by the choices we make as the waiter gets impatient for our order or in the practicalities ad whimsies of what we load into our shopping carts or farmers'-market bags. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I know that it is not necessary that there be one right thing. There may be two right things. There may be no right things. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
In the end, everyone loses everyone. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I wanted to build walls around him, I wanted to separate inside from outside, I wanted to give him an infinitely long blank book and the rest of time. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I am blind. I am supposed to be retarded. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
We need a better way to talk about eating animals, a way that doesn't ignore or even just shruggingly accept things like habits, cravings, family and history but rather incorporates them into the conversation. The more they are allowed in, the more able we will be to follow our best instincts. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
The justifications for eating animals and for not eating them are often identical: we are not them. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Ultimately, the controversy around PETA may have less to do with the organization than with those of us who stand in judgment of it - that is, with the unpleasant realization that "those PETA people" have stood up for the values we have been too cowardly or forgetful to defend ourselves. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Given that eating animals is in absolutely no way necessary for my family - unlike some in the world, we have easy access to a wide variety of other foods - should we ear animals? -- Jonathan Safran Foer
All told, farmed animals in the United States produce 130 times as much waste as the human population - -- Jonathan Safran Foer
In high school I became a vegetarian more times than I can now remember, most often as an effort to claim some identity in a world of people whose identities seemed to come effortlessly. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
There's no being wrong in seeing something in art, only being disagreed with. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I looked at everyone and wondered where they came from, and who they missed, and what they were sorry for. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
The Eskimos have four hundred words for snow, and the Jewshave four hundred for schmuck. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Just because you're an atheist, that doesn't mean you wouldn't love for things to have reasons for why they are. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I was pretending to be a monster, and I became a monster. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I said, not knowing what the next words out of my mouth would be, but wanting them to be mine, wanting, more than I'd ever wanted anything, to express the center of me to and be understood. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
In the water I saw my father's face, and that face saw the face of its father, and so on, and so on, reflecting backward to the beginning of time, to the face of God, in whose image we were created. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
It broke my heart into more pieces than my heart was made of, why can't people say what they mean at the time? -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I'm less worried about accomplishment - as younger people always can't help but be - and more concerned with spending my time well, spending time with my family, and reading, learning things. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I flipped back through the pad of paper while I thought about what Stephen Hawking would do next. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
He couldn't bear to live, but he couldn't bear to die. He couldn't bear the thought of he making love to someone else, but neither could he bear the absence of the thought. And as for the note, he couldn't bear to keep it, but he couldn't bear to destroy it either. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Is there really anyone, besides Rudy Giuliani, who prefers the new Times Square? -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Jed Perl writes precisely and ecstatically. Antoine' s Alphabet is a history and a fairy tale, a work of criticism, and a work of art. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Family are the people who must make you feel ashamed when you are deserving of shame. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I think there's going to be something that happens now, where books move in two directions, one toward digitized formats and one toward remembering what's nice about the physicality of them. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
We laughed and laughed, together and separately, out loud and silently, we were determined to ignore whatever needed to be ignored, to build a new world from nothing if nothing in our world could be salvaged. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Why do beautiful songs make you sad?' 'Because they aren't true.' 'Never?' 'Nothing is beautiful and true. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Songs are as sad as the listener. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
It was not the Jew, of course, who invented the love poem, but the other way around. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Why didn't he say goodbye?
I gave myself a bruise.
Why didn't he say 'I love you'? -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I believed him. I was not stupid. I was his wife. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Whenever people cried themselves to sleep, the tears would all go to the same place, and in the morning the weatherman could report if the water level of the Reservoir of Tears had gone up or down, and you could know if New York was in heavy boots. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others
The only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Grandfather informs me that is not possible. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
In sickness and in sickness. That is what I wish for you. Don't seek or expect miracles. There are no miracles. Not anymore. And there are no cures for the hurt that hurts most. There is only the medicine of believing each other's pain, and being present for it. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
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
Years were passing through the spaces between moments. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
It's better to lose something than never to have had -- Jonathan Safran Foer
People don't care enough. They don't get worked up enough. They don't get angry enough. They don't get passionate enough. I'd rather somebody hate what I do than be indifferent to it. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
He was caught somewhere between his mother's last kiss and the first kiss he would give his child, between the war that was and would be -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I wish my days could be washed away like the chalk lines of my days. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
So, then why am I your son?" "Because Mom and I made love, and one of my sperm fertilized one of her eggs." "Excuse me while I regurgitate." "Don't act your age. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Just how common do such savageries have to be for a decent person to be unable to overlook them? If you knew that one in one thousand food animals suffered actions like those described above, would you continue to eat animals? One in one hundred? One in ten? -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Chickens once had a life expectancy of fifteen to twenty years, but the modern broiler is typically killed at around six weeks. Their daily growth rate has increased roughly 400 percent.) -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Maybe one day the world will change, that we'll be in a luxurious position of being able to debate whether or not it's inherently wrong to eat animals, but the question doesn't matter right now. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
But the point isn't that I want to know everything about you. It's that I don't want anything about you withheld. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Thinking would keep me alive. But now I am alive and thinking is killing me -- Jonathan Safran Foer
One day I wandered away from her and hid. I liked the way it felt to have someone look for me, to hear my name again and again. "Oskar! Oskar!" Maybe I didn't even like it, but I needed it right then. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
Succotash my cocker spaniel, you fudging crevasse-hole dipshiitake! -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Succotash my Balzac, dipshiitake. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
My friends are appeased to stay in Odessa for their entire lives. They are appeased to age like their parents, and become parents like their parents. They do not desire anything more than everything they have known. OK, but this is not for me, and it will not be for Little Igor. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
It's hard to say goodbye to the place you've lived. It can be as hard as saying goodbye to a person. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
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
You are the only one who has understood even a whisper of me, and I will tell you that I am the only person who has understood even a whisper of you. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
He Wrote, Are you OK?
I told him, My eyes are crummy.
He wrote, But are you OK?
I told him, That's a very complicated question.
He wrote, That's a very simple answer.
I asked, Are you OK?
He wrote, Some mornings I wake up feeling grateful. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
An ocean could not explain the distance we have traveled. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Everyone could know what everyone else felt, and we could be more careful with each other, because you'd never want to tell a person whose skin was purple that you're angry at her for being late, just like you would want to pat a pink person on the back and tell him, Congratulations! -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
We are lying to ourselves and to each other.
Lying about what? I don't care if we're lying.
I am a bad person.
I don't care. I don't care what you are. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
So it had something to do with the sinner, and something with the judge, and the fear of not being forgiven, and the relief of being loved again. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I tried the key in all the doors, even though he said he didn't recognize it. It's not that I didn't trust him, becuase I did. It's that at the end of my search I wanted to be able to say: I don't know how I could have tried harder. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
There is a glaring reason that the necessary total ban on nontherapeutic use of antibiotics hasn't happened: The factory farm industry, allied with the pharmaceutical industry, has more power than public-health professionals. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Sadness of love without release. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Feeding my children is not like feeding myself: it matters more. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Let's say what we mean: animals are bled, skinned, and dismembered while conscious. It happens all the time, and the industry and the government know it. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
The ground is still filled iwth rings, and money, and pictures, and Jewish things. I was only able to find a few of them, but they fill the earth. The hero did not ask me once what she was saying. I am not certain if he knew what she was saying, or if he knew not to inquire. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Food is not just what we put in our mouths to fill up; it is culture and identity. Reason plays some role in our decisions about food, but it's rarely driving the car. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
This was a troublesome supplication, because at the dawn of July, Ukraine was to celebrate the first birthday of its ultramodern constitution, which makes
us feel very nationalistic, and so many people would be on vacation in foreign places. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
It hurts me when you do not want to hurt me. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Dad can be such a pussy. But Mum can be such a dick. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
He invented stories so fantastic she had to believe. Of cours, she was only a child, still removing the dust from her first death. What else could she do? And he was already accumulating the dust of his second death. What else could he do? -- Jonathan Safran Foer
As told by Kafka's close friend Max Brod:
"Suddenly he began to speak to the fish in their illuminated tanks. 'Now at least I can look at you in peace, I don't eat you anymore.' It was the time he turned strictly vegetarian. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
They're all about love. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Now that I'm thinking about it," I told Gerald, "they could make an incredibly long limousine that had it's back seat at your mom's VJ and it's front seat at your mausoleum, and it would be as long as your life. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Parents are always more knowledgeable than their children, and children are always smarter than their parents. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I will describe my eyes and then begin the story. My eyes are blue and resplendent. Now I will begin the story. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Why would a farmer lock the doors of his turkey farm? -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Our stories are so fundamental to us that it's easy to forget that we choose them. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
One of the things that I love about writing novels is that it really doesn't matter what next step you take as long as you're pursuing some intuition or instinct. Of course, then, intuitions or instincts don't make for great novels, but they often make for good first drafts. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
She wrote, I wish I could be a girl again, with a chance to live my life again. I have suffered so much more than I needed to. And the joys I have felt have not always been joyous. I could have lived differently. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Stories about food are stories about us-our history and our values. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
The Gypsy girl carved love letters into trees, filling the forest with notes for him. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Lvov is a city like New York City in America. New York City, in truth, was designed on the model of Lvov. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I could tell that Mom was dreaming, but I didn't want to know what she was dreaming about, because I had enough of my own nightmares, and if she had been dreaming something happy, I would have been angry at her for dreaming something happy. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I am doing something I hate for you. This is what it means to be in love. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
We would have been safe. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Why do I write? It's not that I want people to think I am smart, or even that I am a good writer. I write because I want to end my loneliness. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I did not feel that he owed it to me. And I did not feel like I owed it to him. We owed it to each other, which is something different. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
It would be refreshing to have a politician try to defend guns without any reference to the Second Amendment, but on the merits of guns. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
In the morning, when the nothing vase casts a something shadow, like the memory of someone you've lost, what can you say about that? -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
I wanted to pull the thread, unravel the scarf of my silence and start again from the beginning. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
What were we spending so much time doing if not getting to know each other? -- Jonathan Safran Foer
He promised us that everything would be okay. I was a child, but I knew that everything would not be okay. That did not make my father a liar. It made him my father. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Not in all ways (of course), but the animals you know have power: they have abilities humans lack, could be dangerous, could bring life, mean things that mean things. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I think after you live it's like before you lived. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I put my hands into the pockets of all his jackets -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
No one fired a pistol to mark the start of the race to the bottom. The earth just tilted and everyone slid into the hole. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
I never confused what I had with what I was. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Grandfather kicked the stop pedal, and my face gave a high-five to the front window. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Abraham didn't say, "What do you want?" He didn't say, "Yes?" He answered with a statement: "Here I am." Whatever God needs or wants, Abraham is wholly present for Him, without conditions or reservations or need for explanation. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
It is better to lose than never to have had. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
There was a single thought in my head: Keep thinking. Thinking would keep me alive. But now I am alive, and thinking is killing me. I think and think and
think. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Sometimes feelings are like that - not positive, not negative, just a lot. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I had to do it for myself. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
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
We believed in our grandmother's cooking more fervently than we believed in God. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
At first it made me angry, but then it made me sad, and then it made me so grateful, and then it made me angry again, and I went through these feelings hundreds of times, stopping on each for only a moment and then moving to the next. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I am always sad, I think. Perhaps this signifies that I am not sad at all, because sadness is something lower than your normal disposition, and I am always the same thing. Perhaps I am the only person in the world, then, who never becomes sad. Perhaps I am lucky. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Every parent who loses a child finds a way to laugh again. The timbre begins to fade. The edge dulls. The hurt lessens. Every love is carved from loss. Mine was. Yours is. Your great-great-
great-children's will be. But we learn to live with that love. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Rabbi, I feel no despair anymore. For seventy years I had only nightmares, but I have no nightmares anymore. I feel only gratitude for my life, for every moment I lived. Not only the good moments. I feel gratitude for every moment of my life. I have seen so many miracles. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Whether we change our lives or do nothing, we have responded. To do nothing is to do something. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
She is deranged," I said, "but so so playful. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
One weird thing is, I wonder if everyone's hearts would start to beat at the same time, like how women who live together have their menstrual periods at the same time, which I know about, but don't really want to know about. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
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
Yesterday I wanted to turn inside out. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Between any two beings there is a unique, uncrossable distance, an unenterable sanctuary. Sometimes it takes the shape of aloneness. Sometimes it takes the shape of love. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
From the unemployed Sloucher Lumpl W, who reclined on Passover not because it was religious custom but because why should that night be different from all others?: I'm not the greatest person that ever lived, but I would be a good father, and you know it. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
Death is the only thing in life that you absolutely have to be aware of as it's happening. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
They do not desire anything more than everything they have known. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
There's a Hasidic proverb: 'While we pursue happiness, we flee from contentment.'" Jacob -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I felt it very moving to feel his touch, and to remember that hands can also show love. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Because sometimes people who seem good
end up being not as good as you might have hoped. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
She had fallen in love so many times that she began to suspect she was not falling in love at all, but doing something much more ordinary. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
THE PROBLEM OF GOOD: WHY UNCONDITIONALLY GOOD THINGS HAPPEN TO UNCONDITIONALLY BAD PEOPLE
(SEE GOD) -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
Humans are the only animal that blushes, laughs, has religion, wages war, and kisses with lips. So in a way, the more you kiss with lips, the more human you are. And the more you wage war. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
There are many premium writers, yes? Tolstoy, yes? He wrote War, and also Peace, which are both premium books. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I can forgive you for leaving, but not for coming back. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
The more exposure people have to the realities of factory farming, the more we will see people rejecting it. It's already happening. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Factory farming, of course, does not cause all the world's problems, but is is remarkable just how many of them intersect there. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Rationally, factory farming is so obviously wrong, in so many ways. In all of my reading and conversations, I've yet to find a credible defense of it. But food is not rational. Food is culture, habit, and identity. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Once you hear something, you can never return to the time before you heard it. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
About 3 million pounds of antibiotics are given to humans each year, but a whopping 17.8 million pounds are fed to livestock. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Thanksgiving is the holiday that encompasses all others. All of them, from Martin Luther King Day to Arbor Day to Christmas to Valentine's Day, are in one way or another about being thankful. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
It's always possible to wake someone from sleep, but no amount of noise will wake someone who is pretending to be asleep. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Sadness of feeling the need to create beautiful things; -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I just couldn't be dead any longer. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
These little daily choices that we're so used to thinking are irrelevant are the most important thing we do all day long. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
The hardest part of writing is not to get the ideas but to remember, why it is important to get them. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
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
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
What's it about? she asked.
It's about love.
She laughed. They're all about love. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
To remember my values, I need to lose certain tastes and find other handles for the memories that they once helped me carry. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I shook my tambourine the whole time, because it helped me remember that even though I was going through different neighborhoods, I was still me. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I promised myself I wouldn't be the first to look away, but I was. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
But I do not do these things because we are family. I do them because they are common decencies. That is an idiom that the hero taught me. I do them because I am not a big fucking asshole. That is another idiom that the hero taught me. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
I am sure people tell you this constantly but if you looked up 'incredibly beautiful' in the dictionary there would be a picture of you. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
We need enormous pockets, pockets big enough for our families and our friends, and even the people who aren't on our lists, people we've never met but still want to protect. We need pockets for boroughs and for cities, a pocket that could hold the universe. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
You're impossible, Yankel! I'm possibly possible. Thank you, she said, -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
The best books are the ones that ask the most questions. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
A few weeks after the worst day, I started writing lots of letters. I don't know why, but it was one of the only things that made my boots lighter. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
There are worse things, worse than being like us. Look, at least we're alive. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
She extended a hand that I didn't know how to take, so I broke its fingers with my silence. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
She brushed her eyelashes against his chest. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
Reality Hunger is more than thought-provoking; it's one of the most beautiful books I've read in a long time. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
He chose illness, because he knew of no other way to be seen. Not even by those looking at him. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
She smiled a smile to bring a thousand ships to harbor. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
Why didn't I learn to treat everything like it was the last time. My greatest regret was how much I believed in the future. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I want an infinitely blank book and the rest of time ...
... why didn't I learn to treat everything like it was the last time, my greatest regret is how much I believed in the future. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I'm here, Dr. Fein, because it upsets my mom that I'm having an impossible time with my life." "Should it upset her?" "Not really. Life is impossible. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Even Alf is not humorous at times. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I'm deeply curious about Jewish things. I've toyed around with the idea of going to rabbinical school. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
From where she is, the page- her paper-thin future-is infinitely heavy. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
It's rarely talked about, but hunting for sport is just about as vile as we humans get. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
As long as I am thinking, I am alive. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
Does it make you sad that we love the kids more than we love each other?" That exact line - those words in that order - had been in the script for months. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
We are traumatized people. And nothing else has trauma's power to deform the mind and heart. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Love itself became the object of her love. She loved herself in love, she loved loving love, as love loves loving, and was able, in that way, to reconcile herself with a world that fell so short of what she would have hoped for. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
Well, let me leave it at this: if God does exist, He would have a great deal be sad about. And if He doesn't exist, then that too would make Him quite sad, I imagine. So to answer your question, God must be sad. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Ironically, the utterly unselective omnivore
"I'm easy; I'll eat anything"
can appear more socially sensitive than the individual who tries to eat in a way that is good for society. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
That really changed me, when I realized that an excruciating life is worse than an excruciating death. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
How beautiful is forgetting! What relief it would be for the world to lose some of its contents. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Every moment before this one depends on this one. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I see myself as someone who makes things. Definitions have never done anything but constrain. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I went to the guest room and pretended to write. I hit the space bar again and again and again. My life story was spaces. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Yes, I cannot dispute that she is crazy. But she is also compassionate. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
She found the company that made her favorite architectural model trees. They weren't the most realistic, they weren't even well made. She didn't like them because they evoked trees but because they evoked the sadness that trees evoke. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
In 1930, more than 20% of the American population was employed in agriculture. Today it's less than 2%. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
[ ... ] 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
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
The kind of funny irony is that a lot of people talk about ethical meat eating as if it's a way to care about things, but also not to alienate yourself from the rest of the world. But it's so much more alienating than vegetarianism. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Food is not rational. Food is culture, habit, craving and identity. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
Do not have any other loves before me in your heart. Do not take my name in vain. Do not kill me. Observe me, and keep me holy. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
As we drove, I imagined we were standing still and the world was coming toward us. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
When you're a dad, there's no one above you. If I don't do something that has to be done, who is going to do it? -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Good people don't make fewer mistakes, they're just better at apologizing. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Jacob didn't want to coerce or be coerced, but what was he supposed to do? Sit on his hands waiting for his grandfather to shatter his hip and die in a hospital room as every abandoned old person is destined to do? -- Jonathan Safran Foer
People always ask what a book is about, as if it has to be about something. I don't want to write books that lend themselves to that sort of description. My books are more a kind of breaking-down. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
A powerful wind swept through the shtetl, making it whistle. Those studying obscure texts in dimly lit rooms looked up. Lovers making amends and promises, amendments and excuses, fell silent. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
And here I am, instead of there. I'm sitting in this library, thousands of miles from my life, writing another letter I know I won't be able to send, no matter how hard I try and how much I want to. How did that boy making love behind that shed become this man writing this letter at this table? -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
Sometimes I imagined stitching all of our little touches together. How many hundreds of thousands of fingers brushing against each other does it take to make love? Why does anyone ever make love? -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I used to think that humor was the only way to appreciate how wonderful and terrible the world is, to celebrate how big life is. But now I think the opposite. Humor is a way of shrinking from that wonderful and terrible world. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
He was sculpting me. He was trying to make me so he could fall in love with me .. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL: WHY UNCONDITIONALLY BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO UNCONDITIONALLY GOOD PEOPLE
They never do. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
We shouldn't be intimidated by someone else's idea of perfection if it will prevent us from taking steps we actively want to take. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Whether we're talking about fish species, pigs, or some other eaten animal, is such suffering the most important thing in the world? Obviously not. But that's not the question. Is it more important that sushi, bacon, or chicken nuggets? That's the question. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Instead of singing in the shower, I would write out the lyrics of my favourite songs, the ink would turn the water blue or red or green, and the music would run down my legs. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I know a lot about birds and bees, but I don't know very much about the birds and the bees. Everything I do know I had to teach myself on the Internet, because I don't have anyone to ask. For example, I know that you give someone a blowjob by putting your penis in their mouth. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
She is deranged, but so so playful. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
I wanted to cry but I didn't, I probably should have cried, I should have drowned us there in the room ending our suffering. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Raising your kids vegetarian is a great way to encourage them to do the opposite of what you want! But the goal is not to have them have the same values that I have. It's to have them act on their values. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
And so was the synagogue lifted and moved. It was in 1783 that wheels were attached, making the shtetl's ever-changing negotiation of Jewishness and Humanness less of a schlep. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
They lay in silence, thinking their own thoughts, each trying to know the other's. They were becoming strangers on top of each other. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I started carrying blank books like this one around, which I would fill with all the things I couldn't say ... -- Jonathan Safran Foer
If we were to one day encounter a form of life more powerful and intelligent than our own, and it regarded us as we regard fish, what would be our argument against being eaten? -- Jonathan Safran Foer
For how long could we fail until we surrendered? -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
A group of boys lumbered down the halls of Adas Israel, laughing, punching, blood rushing from developing brains to developing genitals and back again in the zero-sum game of puberty. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
Remembering and forgetting are part of the same mental process. To write down one detail of an event is to not write down another (unless you keep writing forever). -- Jonathan Safran Foer
No, I do not like music. (But what she really was trying to say was this: I like music better than anything in the world, after you.) -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Then I have some bad news for you, because humans are going to destroy each other as soon as it becomes easy enough to, which will be very soon. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Sometimes one simply wants to disappear. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Desperately knocking against the blind little world, i loosened one of its planks, opening a window to a new, wider world. There, spread out, was a profusion of geography, of atmosphere, of full empty air. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
We were quiet on the car ride home. I turned on the radio and found a station playing "Hey Jude." It was true, I didn't want to make it bad. I wanted to take the sad song and make it better. It's just that I didn't know how. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Something having been done just about everywhere just about always is no kind of justification for doing it now. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Cruelty depends on an understanding of cruelty, and the ability to choose against it. Or to choose to ignore it. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
What do babies dream of? She must be dreaming of the before-life, just as I dream of the afterlife. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I don't think that there are any limits to how excellent we could make life seem. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
The only thing more painful than being an active forgetter is to be an inert rememberer. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
It was not the feeling of completeness I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Did you manufacture any Z's? -- Jonathan Safran Foer
The French, who love their dogs, sometimes eat their horses. The Spanish, who love their horses, sometimes eat their cows. The Indians, who love their cows, sometimes eat their dogs. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
You are a schmuck," I informed the hero. "You're not using the word correctly," he said. "Yes I am," I said. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
My greatest fear is feeling like a professional novelist. Somebody who creates characters, who sits down and has pieces of paper taped to the wall - what's going to happen in this scene, or this act. What I like is for it to be a much more scary, sloppy reflection of who I am. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
I could not believe in a God that would challenge faith like this. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
If the thrill of hunting were in the hunt, or even in the marksmanship, a camera would do just as well. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Herschel was a Jew."
"And he was my best friend."
"He was his best friend."
"And I murdered him. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
People around the world were moving from one place to another. No one was staying. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
It can be challenge enough to have to eat with myself. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Not responding is a response - we are equally responsible for what we don't do. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
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
If nothing matters, there's nothing to save. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I'm telling you all of this because I'll never be your father, and you will always be my child. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Parents don't have the luxury of being reasonable, not any more than a religious person does. What can make religious people and parents so utterly insufferable is also what makes religion and Parenthood so utterly beautiful: the All or nothing wager. The Faith. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
That's the nice thing about being a vegetarian. You don't have to be neurotic. Selective omnivores have to be neurotic. Personally, I don't have time for all that; I don't want to get into it. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
If we communicated with something like music, we would never be misunderstood, because there is nothing in music to understand ... But until we find this new way of speaking, until we can find a nonapproximate vocabulary, nonsense words are the best thing we've got. Ifactifice is one such word. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I ran rather than walked, anxious to lose my way. All I wanted was to be unsure. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
The Uprighters called them names and promised them an eternity of agony in the next world for their eagerness to be comfortable in this one. But like Shmul S, the intestine-tied milkman, the Slouchers couldn't give a shit. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
The difference between conceding and accepting is depression. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I am the one who broke the rule. But I am the one who made the rule you couldn't live with. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
The persistence of the story of animal consent into the contemporary era tells of a human appreciation of the stakes, and a desire to do the right thing. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
In my dream, all of the collapsed ceilings reformed above us. The fire went back into the bombs, which rose up and into the bellies of planes whose propellers turned backward, like the second hands of the clocks across Dresden, only faster. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Cutting down that tree was my last war!" I asked him who won, which I thought was a nice question, because it would let him say that he won, and feel proud. He said, "The ax won! It's always that way! -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I am not a bad person," he said. "I am good person who has lived un a bad time. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
We are not only the tellers of our stories, we are the stories themselves. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
What kind of world would we create if three times a day we activated our compassion and reason as we sat down to eat, if we had the moral imagination and the pragmatic will to change our most fundamental act of consumption? -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
Faces pressed against the pane, full of little, content with sawdust tears. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
Our response to the factory farm is ultimately a test of how we respond to the powerless, to the most distant, to the voiceless - it is a test of how we act when no one is forcing us to act one way or another. Consistency is not required, but engagement with the problem is. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Jacob was right when, after Sam's injury, he said it was too much love for happiness. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Few people sufficiently appreciate the colossal task of feeding a world of billions of omnivores who demand meat with their potatoes. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
And when the blush of a schoolgirl's cheeks was mistaken for the crimson of a holy man's fingers, it was the schoolgirl who was called hussy, tramp, slut. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) calculated 24.6 million pounds of antibiotics were fed to chickens, pigs, and other farmed animals, only counting nontherapeutic uses. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Writing is like pulling teeth out of your penis. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
He shrugged his shoulders, like he had no idea what I was talking about. I loved that. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
There's nothing good about being certain about things. And I don't think there's any real talent in using language in a manipulative way, with phrases like "tax relief" or "Social Security reform." It's politically clever, but it's also completely disingenuous, and it's not something to aspire to. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Dear Anna, we will live in a home with no walls, so that everywhere we go will be our home. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Food ethics are so complex because food is bound to both taste buds and taste, to individual biographies and social histories. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Nothing- not a conversation, not a handshake or even a hug- establishes friendship so forcefully as eating together. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
What the world does not need is a Haggadah that pats itself on the back. It needs a Haggadah that gets out of the way, that starts a conversation and gets out of the way. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
It might sound naive to suggest that whether you order a chicken patty or a veggie burger is a profoundly important decision. Then again, it certainly would have sounded fantastic if in the 1950's you were told that where you sat in a restaurant or on a bus could begin to uproot racism. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
In America right now, we use words like 'smart' to talk about bombs. American rhetoric is grounded in ideas of capital-G Good, capital-E Evil, and it's very clear who is on which side. But in a book you can do just the opposite. You can use all lower-case words. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
He was like a book that you could feel good holding, that you could talk about without ever having read, that could you recommend. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Maybe it's true that you can use up all of your tears...It was nice to think about, because what I wanted was to be empty. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
The end of suffering does not justify the suffering, and so there is no end to suffering. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
The bruises go away, and so does how you hate, and so does the feeling that everything you receive from life is something you have earned. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
Shyness is when you turn your head away from something you want. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
But unlike all farmed meat, which requires the creation and maintenance of animals, dogs are practically begging to be eaten. Three to four million dogs and cats are euthanized annually. This amounts to millions of pounds of meat now being thrown away every year. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Books are slow, books are quiet. The Internet is fast and loud. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
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
The philosopher Elaine Scarry has observed that "beauty always takes place in the particular." Cruelty, on the other hand, prefers abstraction. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I always write out of a need to read something, rather than a need to write something. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I tried to think about other things. I tried to invent optimistic inventions. But the pessimistic ones were extremely loud. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
the desire to wring out a few more drips of happiness almost always destroyed the happiness you were so lucky to have, and so foolish never to acknowledge. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
There are a lot of things that we crave, there are a lot of things that would make us perhaps more fulfilled in a sensory way that we just say no to. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
We all have a set number of days to indent the world with our beliefs, to find and create the beauty that only a finite existence allows for, to wrestle with the question of purpose and wrestle with our answers. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
If it had and answer, it wouldn't really be love, would it? -- Jonathan Safran Foer
When you read something you have written, you have to confront some of the lies you have been telling yourself. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
This is my heart. You are touching it with your left hand. You are touching it with your left hand, not because you are left-handed, although you might be, but because I am holding it against my heart. What you are feeling is the beating of my heart. It is what keeps me alive. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I see bad stuff on the street all the time that I don't do anything about. I do bad stuff myself all the time. The goal is not to somehow be perfect - that's silly, that's naive. The goal is to just recognize there are choices in front of us, and to try to make better ones. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Anyone who believes that a second is faster than a decade did not live life. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
My feelings have never once cared about what they should be. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
Everything I did, I did because I thought it was the correct thing to do ... I am not a hero, it is true ... But I am not a bad person, either. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
If people thought about food more like how we think about the environment, a lot of people would be eating differently and the whole system would look a lot different. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Today, it isn't unusual for meat to travel almost halfway around the globe to reach your supermarket. The average distance our meat travels hovers arounf fifteen hundred miles. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
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
Why does watching a dog be a dog fill one with happiness? -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Oh,' she said. 'I have never seen a Jew before. Can I see his horns? -- Jonathan Safran Foer
They were miserable at sports, but great at fantasy sports. They avoided fights, but sought arguments. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
My boots were so heavy that I was glad there was a column beneath us. How could such a lonely person have been living so close to me my whole life? If I had known, I would have gone up to keep him company. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Life is precious, Jacob thought. The most important of all thoughts, and the most obvious, and the most difficult to remember to have. How different my life would have been if I could have had that thought before I was forced to. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I'm not funny. People assume that because my books are funny, I'll be funny in real life. It's the inevitable disappointment of meeting me. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Does it break my heart, of course, every moment of every day, into more pieces than my heart was made of ... -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Love...is the immovability of truth. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
In truth I was manufacturing a brick wall of shits. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
It would be possible, in theory, for life and art to be reversed. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
The world is a big place," he said, "but so is the inside of an apartment! -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Hunting will never feed lots of people; it will always be a hobby. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Brod was afraid any tears of her own would cause the walls of the old house to give way, so she sandbagged them behind her eyes, exiled them to someplace deeper, safer. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
My wife and I have chosen to bring up our children as vegetarians. In another time or place, we might have made a different decision. But the realities of our present moment compelled us to make that choice. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
What does it remember like? -- Jonathan Safran Foer
What if I never stop inventing? -- Jonathan Safran Foer
And I love the idea of books being more than books, or being, rather, something other than books. I think the ideal experience of my book would be like listening to music. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Our unspoken agreements led to disagreements, to suffering. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
She wanted nothing more than someone to miss, to touch, with whom to speak like a child, with whom to be a child. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Nothing embarrassed her. I admired that so much, because everything embarrassed me, and that hurt me. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Do you have any coffee?' ... 'It stunts my growth, and I'm afraid of death. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Life was a small negative space cut out of the eternal solidity, and for the first time, it felt precious - not like all of the words that had come to mean nothing, but like the last breath of a drowning victim. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I trust that you have a good purpose for your ignorance -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
I think and think and think, I've thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Since the world has changed so much, the same values don't lead to the same choices anymore. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Even if I don't like what I am, I know what I am. My children like what they are, but they don't know what they are. So tell me which is worse. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
The question, I've come to think, is not what inspires one to change, but what inspires one to remain changed. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
It was not until very much in the posterior that I understanded that each of us was laughing for a different reason, for our own reason, and that not on of those reasons had a thing to do with the potato. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
She asked: "What can you promise?" He promised: "Things are about to be different. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Everyone performs bad actions ... A bad person is someone who does not lament his bad actions. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
It's much easier to be cruel than one might think. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Feathers filled the small room. Our laughter kept the feathers in the air. I thought about birds. Could they fly is there wasn't someone, somewhere, laughing? -- Jonathan Safran Foer
She didn't love life. There was no convincing reason to live -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Maybe I'll try to be more patient with morons. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
There is nothing wrong with compromising. Even if you compromise almost everything. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
None of the ways people were talking about September 11 felt right to me. I don't buy into the way [George W.] Bush talks about it. I don't buy into the way the 9/11 commission talks about it. It isn't that I don't believe them. It's just that they're not the tellings for me. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
You're incredibly beautiful,' I told her, because she was fat, so I thought it would be an especially nice compliment, and also make her like me again, even though I was sexist. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
If I'd been someone else in a different world I'd've done something different, but I was myself and the world was the world, so I was silent. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
The writing itself is no big deal. The editing, and even more than that, the self-doubt, is excruciatingly impossible. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Kids are a great analogy. You want your kids to grow up, and you don't want your kids to grow up. You want your kids to become independent of you, but it's also a parent's worst nightmare: That they won't need you. It's like the real tragedy of parenting. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
We shared the smile of recognizing ourselves in each other, how many imposters do I have? Do we all make the same mistakes, or has one of us gotten it right, or even just a bit less wrong, am I the imposter? -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
Sadness of not knowing enough words to [express what you mean] ... -- Jonathan Safran Foer
My dream went all the way back to the beginning. The rain rose into the clouds, and the animals descended the ramp. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Oh, I'd say I like a meal as much as anybody. But I find a certain kind of foodiness silly, gluttonous and embarrassing. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
And she would say, "Today you believe in God?" And he would say, "Today I believe in love". -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Thomas! What are you doing!" and I gestured, "I thought this was Nothing," covering myself with one of my daybooks ,and she said, "It's Something! -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I know you look both ways before you cross the street, but I want you to look both ways a second time, because I told you to. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
When we talk about protecting our right to have guns, we are talking about protecting our right to shoot bullets. So what is it that's so important to shoot at? -- Jonathan Safran Foer
People who care about animals tend to care about people. They don't care about animals to the exclusion of people. Caring is not a finite resource and, even more than that, it's like a muscle: the more you exercise it, the stronger it gets. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
Tomorrow was over the horizon and it would take an entire day to reach -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I wanted to hit him.
I wanted to hold him.
I wanted to shout myself into his ear. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
There are only so many times that you can utter 'It does not hurt' before it begins to hurt even more than the hurt. You become enlightened of the feeling of feeling hurt, which is worse, I am certain, than the existent hurt. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
But there was always work to be done. We spent our lives making livings. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
What is being awake if not interpreting our dreams, or dreaming if not interpreting our wake? -- Jonathan Safran Foer
The floors were like marble chessboards, and the ceilings were like cakes. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
There has yet to be a human to survive a span of history without at least one end of the world. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Long before man traveled into space, rabbis debated how one would observe Shabbat there-not because they anticipated space travel but because Buddhists strive to live with questions and Jews would rather die. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I wasn't trying to invent better and better homes, but to show her that homes didn't matter, we could live in any home, in any city, in any country, in any century, and be happy, as if the world were just what we lived in. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
AND IF WE ARE TO STRIVE FOR A BETTER FUTURE, MUSTN'T WE BE FAMILIAR AND RECONCILED WITH OUR PAST? -- Jonathan Safran Foer
She laughed, I love it when she laughs, although the truth is I am not in love with her. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I have so much to say to you. I want to begin at the beginning, because that is what you deserve. I want to tell you everything, without leaving out a single detail. But where is the beginning? And what is everything? -- Jonathan Safran Foer
It might sound fantastic, but when we bother to look, it's hard to deny that our day-to-day choices shape the world. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
So in a way, the more you kiss with lips, the more human you are. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I love sushi, I love fried chicken, I love steak. But there is a limit to my love, -- Jonathan Safran Foer
There were so many different ways to die, and I just need to know which was his. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I need an office, so I can have a place where I don't write. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Everyone has a pipeline through which he pushes what he is willing and able to share of himself out into the world, and through which he takes in all of the world that he is willing and able to bear. Max's conduit wasn't bigger than anyone else's, it was simply unclogged. What -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I am willing to be annoying if that's what was necessary. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Cat lovers display an intensity lacking - thank goodness - in most human relationships. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
We eat as sons and daughters, as families, as communities, as generations, as nations, and increasingly as a globe. We can't stop our eating from radiating influence even if we want to. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Feeling pain is still better than not feeling, isn't it? -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Technology celebrates connectedness, but encourages retreat. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I'm possibly possible. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
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
Wolf Blitzer had once again relieved the horrible tension of his purgatorial beard - neither a beard nor not a beard - with yet another new pair of glasses. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
You write to please yourself, you write to move yourself, to engage yourself in the asking of questions that are important to you. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
She said, 'Believe it or not, I used to be idealistic.' I asked her what 'idealistic' meant. 'It means you live by what you think is right.' 'You don't do that anymore?' 'There are questions I don't ask anymore. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I was not going to dance at our wedding and you were not going to speak. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Tomorrow was over the horizon, and would take an entire day to reach. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
The appearance was misleading- human dreams; rubbish heaps abundant yet ephemeral sudden and splendid, only to wilt and perish -- Jonathan Safran Foer
The arm was the arm, and it was the arm - not her husband, or even herself - that she thought about seven years later, on June 28, 1941, as the first German war blasts shook her wooden house to its foundations, and her eyes rolled back in her head to view, before dying, her insides. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
One can build a perfect home, but not live in it. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Each day has been chained to the previous one. But the weeks have wings. Anyone who believes that a second is faster than a decade did not live my life. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
How do children do that? Jacob wondered. Not only enter rooms silently, but at the worst possible moment. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I'm a novelist, I'm not an activist. I'm not a non-fiction writer, I'm not a journalist. I'm not a foodie, I'm not even really an animal person, or an environmentalist. I did the best I could with this, but it's not who I am. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
The end of the world has come often, and continues to come. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
He thought cucumbers were good enough, but pickles were delicious - so absolutely delicious, in fact, that he questioned whether they were, indeed, made from cucumbers, which were only good enough. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
All that mattered was him looking at me -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I have made my own choice, which is vegetarianism, but it's not the choice I'm imposing on anybody else. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
But come. No explaining or mending. Be beside me somewhere. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
No matter how much I feel, I'm not going to let it out. If I have to cry, I'm gonna cry on the inside. If I have to bleed, I'll bruise. If my heart starts going crazy, I'm not gonna tell everyone in the world about it. It doesn't help anything. It just makes everyone's life worse. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I can't live, I've tried and I can't. If that sounds simple, it's simple like a mountain is simple. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
We just stood there, facing each other, but nine floors apart. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Without context, we'd all be monsters. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I got incredibly heavy boots about how relatively insignificant life is, and how, compared to the universe and compared to time, it didn't even matter if I existed at all. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Their length could not be measured in years, just as an ocean could not explain the distance we have traveled, just as the dead can never be counted. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I wanted so much to have a life. Even just once, even for a second. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
In the end, everyone loses everyone. There was no invention to get around that, and so I felt, that night, like the turtle that everything else in the universe was on top of. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
...and when is enough proof enough? -- Jonathan Safran Foer
I'd lost count of the disappointments. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Life overflows with imperfections, but some matter more than others -- Jonathan Safran Foer
The animals are those things that God likes but doesn't love. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Yet we wanted human feeling, gestures free from suspicion, some sympathetic if stammering articulation, half syllables of mystification, a temporary eternal. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
[She] always knew he was a fiction but believed in him anyway. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Use humor as aggressively as chemo. Laugh until your hair falls out. There is nothing that can't be played for a laugh. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Only one thing can keep something close over time: holding it there. Grappling with it. Wrestling it to the ground, as Jacob did with the angel, and refusing to let go. What we don't wrestle we let go of. Love isn't the absence of struggle. Love is struggle. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Your dad didn't die, so I won't be able to explain it to you. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Sam enjoyed knowledge. The accumulation and distribution of facts gave him a feeling of control, of utility, of the opposite of the powerlessness that comes with having a smallish, underdeveloped body that doesn't dependably respond to the mental commands of a largish, overstimulated brain. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
For a long time, I thought I would like to be a doctor. Such a good profession. So explicitly good. Never a waste of time. -- Jonathan Safran Foer