Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

He spent the next weeks blocking scenes of the bureaucrat fucking his wife. On the floor with cooking ingredients. Standing, with socks still on. In the grass of the yard of their new and immense house. He imagined her making noises she never made for him and feeling pleasures he could never provide because the bureaucrat was a man, and he was not a man. Does she suck his penis? he wondered. I know this is a silly thought, a thought that will only bring me pain, but I can't free myself of it. And when she sucks his penis, because she must, what is he doing? Is he pulling her hair back to watch? Is he touching her chest? Is he thinking of someone else? I'll kill him if he is. — 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

When we lift our forks, we hang our hats somewhere. We set ourselves in one relationship or another to farmed animals, farm-workers, national economies, and global markets. Not making a decision
eating 'like everyone else'
is to make the easiest decision, a decision that is increasingly problematic. — 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

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

Of course, consumers might notice that their chickens don't taste quite right - how good could a drug-stuffed, disease-ridden, shit-contaminated animal possibly taste? - but the birds will be injected (or otherwise pumped up) with "broths" and salty solutions to give them what we have come to think of as the chicken look, smell, and taste. — 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

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

Try to live so that you can always tell the truth. — 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

Is this why you think you are chosen by God, because only you can understand the funnies that you make about yourself? — Jonathan Safran Foer

And by midafternoon he was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else. — Jonathan Safran Foer

I put my hand on the doorknob because I thought maybe her hand was on the doorknob on the other side. — Jonathan Safran Foer

When I was nine, I had a babysitter who didn't want to hurt anything. She put it just like that when I asked her why she wasn't having chicken with my older brother and me: "I don't want to hurt anything." [ ... ] What our babysitter said made sense to me, not only because it seemed true, but because it was the extension to food of everything my parents had taught me. We don't hurt family members. We don't hurt friends or strangers. We don't even hurt upholstered furniture. My not having thought to include animals in that list didn't make them the exceptions to it. It just made me a child, ignorant of the world's workings. Until I wasn't. At which point I had to change my life. — 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

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

There were so many different ways to die, and I just need to know which was his. — Jonathan Safran Foer

I asked her, "Are you an optimist or a pessimist?" She looked at her watch and said, "I'm optimistic." "Then I have some bad news for you, because humans are going to destroy each others as soon as it becomes easy enough to, which will be very soon." "Why do beautiful songs make you sad?" "Because they aren't true." "Never?" "Nothing is beautiful and true." She smiled, but in a way that wasn't just happy, and said, "You sound just like Dad. — 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

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

I regret how much I believed in the future. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Don't you find that strange? I can't believe I never found it strange before. It's like your name, how you don't notice it for so long, but when you finally do, you can't help but say it over and over, and wonder why you never thought it was strange that you should have that name, and that everyone has been calling you that name for you whole life. — 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

And she would say, "Today you believe in God?" And he would say, "Today I believe in love". — Jonathan Safran Foer

What if she cried? Of course she would cry. They would all cry. They'd wail. It would be horrible. The kids' lives would be ruined. Tens of thousands of people would die. Israel would be destroyed. He wanted all of that, not because he craved horror, but because imagining the worst kept him safe from it - focusing on doomsday allowed for the day to day. On — Jonathan Safran Foer

We were not rich, but there was nothing we wanted. From my bedroom window I watched the world. And I was safe from the world. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Chickens can do many things, but they cannot make sophisticated deals with humans. — Jonathan Safran Foer

You could bury people one hundred floors down, and a whole dead world could be underneath the living one. — Jonathan Safran Foer

There is an overabundance of rational reasons to say no to factory-farmed meat: It is the No. 1 cause of global warming, it systematically forces tens of billions of animals to suffer in ways that would be illegal if they were dogs, it is a decisive factor in the development of swine and avian flus, and so on. — Jonathan Safran Foer

I felt it very moving to feel his touch, and to remember that hands can also show love. — Jonathan Safran Foer

We are not only the tellers of our stories, we are the stories themselves. — Jonathan Safran Foer

All that mattered was him looking at me — Jonathan Safran Foer

Since the world has changed so much, the same values don't lead to the same choices anymore. — Jonathan Safran Foer

We've made science experiments of ourselves and our children. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Once you hear something, you can never return to the time before you heard it. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Find a printer paper and imagine a full-grown bird shaped something like a football with legs standing on it. Imagine 33,000 of these rectangles in a grid. (Broilers are never in cages, and never on multiple levels.) Now enclose the grid with windowless walls and put a ceiling on top. Run in automated (drug-laced) feed, water, heating, and ventilation systems. This is a farm. — 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

The Upright congregants looked down on the Slouchers, who seemed willing to sacrifice any Jewish law for the sake of what they feebly termed the great and necessary reconciliation of religion with life. 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. — 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

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

(..) 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

Mr. Black started singing a song in some weird language, which I guess was Philippinish. — 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

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

(What are your ghosts like?)
(They are on the insides of the lids of my eyes.)
(This is also where my ghosts reside.)
(You have ghosts?)
(Of course I have ghosts.)
(But you are a child.)
(I am not a child.)
(But you have not known love.)
(These are my ghosts, the spaces amid love.) — Jonathan Safran Foer

We are being very nomadic with the truth, yes? — Jonathan Safran Foer

The world is a big place," he said, "but so is the inside of an apartment! — Jonathan Safran Foer

An ocean could not explain the distance we have traveled. — Jonathan Safran Foer

It's true, I am afraid of dying. I am afraid of the world moving forward without me, of my absence going unnoticed, or worse, being some natural force propelling life on. Is it selfish? Am I such a bad person for dreaming of a world that ends when I do? I don't mean the world ending with respect to me, but every set of eyes closing with mine. — Jonathan Safran Foer

How do children do that? Jacob wondered. Not only enter rooms silently, but at the worst possible moment. — Jonathan Safran Foer

This is the sixty-nine," I told him, presenting the magazine in front of him. I put my fingers
two of them
on the action, so that he would not overlook it. "Why is it dubbed sixty-nine?" he asked, because he is a person hot on fire with curiosity. "It was invented in 1969. My friend Gregory knows a friend of the nephew of the inventor." "What did people do before 1969?" "Merely blowjobs and masticating box, but never in chorus. — Jonathan Safran Foer

She brushed her eyelashes against his chest. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Or perhaps a widow found him and took him in: brought him an easy chair, changed his sweater every morning, shaved his face until the hair stopped growing, took him faithfully to bed with her every night, whispered sweet nothings into what was left of his ear, laughed with him over black coffee, cried with him over yellowing pictures, talked greenly about having kids of her own, began to miss him before she became sick, left him everything in her will, thought of only him as she died, always knew he was fiction but believed in him anyway. — 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

I have witnessed Grandfather cry, and I implore myself to say that I desire to never witness him cry again. If this signifies that I must do things for him so that he will not cry, then I will do those things. If this signifies that I must not look when he cries, then I will not look. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Let love write on you for awhile. — Jonathan Safran Foer

People who become used to saying little become used to feeling little. — 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

I thought about packing my bags, I thought about jumping out a window, I sat on the bed and thought, I thought about you. What kind of food did you life, what was your favorite song, who was the first girl you kissed, and where, and how, I'm running out of room, I want an infinitely long blank book and forever. — Jonathan Safran Foer

I pointed at, Something.
He pointed at, Nothing.
I pointed at, Something.
Nobody pointed at, I love you.
There was no way around it. We could not climb over it, or walk until we found its edge.
I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live, Oskar. Because if I were able to live my life again, I would do things differently.
I would change my life.
I would kiss my piano teacher, even if he laughed at me.
I would jump with Mary on the bed, even if I made a fool of myself.
I would send out ugly photographs, thousands of them. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Consumers are going to have get used to eating less meat - to paying more for better quality meat and eating significantly less of it. — 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

This is love, she thought, isn't it? When you notice someone's absence and hate that absence more than anything? More, even, than you love his presence? — Jonathan Safran Foer

I never thought of myself as quiet or much less silent ... is ignorance bliss, I don't know, but it's painful to think, and tell me, what did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever bring me? I think and think and think, I've thought myself out of happiness one millions times but never once into it. — 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

I'm grateful for anything that reminds me of what's possible in this life. Books can do that. Films can do that. Music can do that. School can do that. It's so easy to allow one day to simply follow into the next, but every once in a while we encounter something that shows us that anything is possible, that dramatic change is possible, that something new can be made, that laughter can be shared. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

As I've grown older, I've grown more convinced there's nothing that shouldn't be talked about. If we think we're protecting each other, we're not. — Jonathan Safran Foer

So many visitors came to rub and kiss different parts of him for the fulfillment of their various wishes that his entire body had to be rebronzed every month. He was a changing god,
destroyed and recreated by his believers, destroyed and recreated by their belief ... Those who prayed came to believe less and less in the god of their creation and more and more in their
belief. — Jonathan Safran Foer

The gift is for you ... The surprise is for me. — Jonathan Safran Foer

I know lots and lots and lots of vegetarians who think it's perfectly all right to kill animals for food to eat, but don't do it because they think all the ways in which it's done are wrong. — Jonathan Safran Foer

There's a difference, I'm sure you realize, between prevalence and importance."
"I'm sure you realize that I don't even know what prevalence means."
"Kanye West is not more culturally important than - " "Yes he is."
" - than Philip Roth."
"First of all, I've never even heard of that person. Second, Kanye might not be valuable to you, but he's definitely more important to the world. — Jonathan Safran Foer

It was inevitable: Yankel fell in love with his never-wife. He would wake from sleep to miss the weight that never depressed the bed next to him, remember in earnest the weight of gestures she never made, long for the un-weight of her un-arm slung over his too-real chest, making his widower's rememberences that much more convincing and his pain that much more real. — Jonathan Safran Foer

She took the posters downtown that afternoon. She filled a rolling suitcase with them ... she took a stapler. And a box of staples. And hope. I think of those things. The paper, the stapler, the staples, the tape, the hope. It makes me sick. Physical things. Forty years of loving someone becomes staples and hop. — Jonathan Safran Foer

It's so hard to express yourself.'
I understand this.'
I want to express myself.'
The same is true for me.'
I'm looking for my voice.'
It's in your mouth.'
I want to do something I'm not ashamed of.'
Something you are proud of, yes?'
Not even. I just don't want to be ashamed. — 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

Sadness of love without release. — Jonathan Safran Foer

How beautiful is forgetting! What relief it would be for the world to lose some of its contents. — 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

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

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

Grief and loss are probably the most fearful creatures that exist. But loss shouldn't be a fearful creature. It should be a creature of wisdom. It should teach us not to fear that tomorrow may never come, but live fully, as though the hours are melting away like seconds. Loss should teach us to cherish those we love, to never do anything that will result in regret, and to cheer on tomorrow with all of its promises of greatness. It's easy and un-extraordinary to be frightened of life. It's far more difficult to arm yourself with the good stuff despite all the bad and step foot into tomorrow as an everyday warrior. — Jonathan Safran Foer

The end of suffering does not justify the suffering, and so there is no end to suffering. — Jonathan Safran Foer

My children not only inspired me to reconsider what kind of eating animal I would be, but also shamed me into reconsideration. — Jonathan Safran Foer

I promised myself I wouldn't be the first to look away, but I was. — 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

It was one of the best days of my life, a day during which I lived my life and didn't think about my life at all. — Jonathan Safran Foer

The sky slowly pulled up its blue dress to reveal night. — Jonathan Safran Foer

We were looking for an acceptable compromise. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Writing's funny, it's like walking down a hall in the dark looking for the light switch, and suddenly you find it, flip it on, and then you discover the hallway you passed through is papered with the novel you've written. — Jonathan Safran Foer

This brings me back to the image of Kafka standing before a fish in the Berlin aquarium, a fish on which his gaze fell in a newly found peace after he decided not to eat animals. Kafka recognized that fish as a member of his invisible family- not as his equal, of course, but as another being that was his concern. — 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