J Foer Quotes & Sayings

It shouldn't be the consumer's responsibility to figure out what's cruel and what's kind, what's environmentally destructive and what's sustainable. Cruel and destructive food products should be illegal. We don't need the option of buying children's toys made with lead paint, or aerosols with chlorofluorocarbons, or medicines with unlabeled side effects. And we don't need the option of buying factory-farmed animals. — Jonathan Safran Foer

I wish I were a poet. I've never confessed that to anyone, and I'm confessing it to you, because you've given me reason to feel that I can trust you. I've spent my life observing the universe, mostly in my mind's eye. It's been a tremendously rewarding life, a wonderful life. I've been able to explore the origins of time and space with some of the great living thinkers. But I wish I were a poet.
Albert Einstein, a hero of mine, once wrote, 'Our situation is the following. We are standing in front of a closed box which we cannot open.'
I'm sure I don't have to tell you that the vast majority of the universe is composed of dark matter. The fragile balance depends on things we'll never be able to see, hear, smell, taste, or touch. Life itself depends on them. What's real? What isn't real? Maybe those aren't the right questions to be asking. What does life depend on?
I wish I had made things for life to depend on. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Someday in the distant cyborg future, when our internal and external memories fully merge, we may come to possess infinite knowledge. But that's not the same thing as wisdom. — Joshua Foer

We spent our lives making livings. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Why is taste, the crudest of our senses, exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other senses? — Jonathan Safran Foer

The movement toward estrangement - from each other, and from themselves - took place in far smaller, subtler steps. They were always becoming closer in the realm of doing - coordinating the ever-expanding routines, talking and texting more (and more efficiently), cleaning together the mess made by the children they made - and farther in feeling. Once, — 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

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

We can't plead ignorance, only indifference. Those alive today are the generations that came to know better. We have the burden and the opportunity of living in the moment when the critique of factory farming broke into the popular consciousness. We are the ones of whom it will be fairly asked, What did you do when you learned the truth about eating animals? — Jonathan Safran Foer

She is deranged, but so so playful. — 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

I wanted to tell her everything, maybe if I'd been able to, we could have lived differently, maybe I'd be there with you now instead of here. Maybe... if I'd said, 'I'm so afraid of losing something I love that I refuse to love anything,' maybe that would have made the impossible possible. Maybe, but I couldn't do it, I had buried too much too deeply inside me. And here I am, instead of there. — Jonathan Safran Foer

When we walk around thinking we have a greater right to eat an animal than the animal has a right to live without suffering, it's corrupting. I'm not speculating. This is our reality. Look at what factory farming is. Look at what we as a society have done to animals as soon as we had the technological power. Look at what we actually do in the name of "animal welfare" and "humaneness," then decide if you still believe in eating meat. — 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

Experts step outside their comfort zone and study themselves failing. — Joshua 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

I wanted to protect him, which I was sure I could do, even if I could not protect myself. — Jonathan Safran Foer

We'll drive backwards
in what will become your new car
to the beach where we first slept side by side.
The green waves will go back into the ocean,
yellow and blue.
You'll pull up my underwear.
I'll button your shirt.
We'll dress and dress and dress.
Then we'll step into our footprints
and erase our trail. — Hiroshi Sugimoto And J 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

Nothing- not a conversation, not a handshake or even a hug- establishes friendship so forcefully as eating together. — Jonathan Safran Foer

They do not desire anything more than everything they have known. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Wings of a half finished book across his chest. — Jonathan Safran Foer

The UN special envoy on food called it a "crime against humanity" to funnel 100 million tons of grain and corn to ethanol while almost a billion people are starving. So what kind of crime is animal agriculture, which uses 756 million tons of grain and corn per year, much more than enough to adequately feed the 1.4 billion humans who are living in dire poverty? And that 756 million tons doesn't even include the fact that 98 percent of the 225-million-ton global soy crop is also fed to farmed animals. You're supporting vast inefficiency and pushing up the price of food for the poorest in the world, — Jonathan Safran Foer

memory is primarily an imaginative process. In fact, learning, memory, and creativity are the same fundamental process directed with a different focus," says Buzan. "The art and science of memory is about developing the capacity to quickly create images that link disparate ideas. — Joshua 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

In my family, Father is the world champion at ending conversations. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Animal agriculture makes a 40% greater contribution to global warming than all transportation in the world combined; it is the number one cause of climate change. — Jonathan Safran Foer

But when, at the end of my sophomore year, I became a philosophy major and started doing my first seriously pretentious thinking, I became a vegetarian again. The kind of willful forgetting that I was sure meat eating required felt too paradoxical to the intellectual life I was trying to shape. I thought life could, should, and must conform to the mold of reason. You can imagine how annoying this made me. — 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

He was not such a special person. He loved to read very much, and also to write. He was a poet, and he exhibited me many of his poems. I remember many of them. They were silly, you could say, and about love. He was always in his room writing those things, and never with people. I used to tell him, What good is all that love doing on paper? I said, Let love write on you for a little. But he was so stubborn. Or perhaps he was only timid. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Books are for those without real lives, he thought. And they are no real replacement. — 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