Safran Foer Quotes & Sayings

I said, I want to tell you something.
She said, you can tell me tomorrow.
I had never told her how much I loved her.
She was my sister.
We slept in the same bed.
There was never a right time to say it.
It was always unnecessary.
The books in my father's shed were sighing.
The sheets were rising and falling around me with Anna's breathing.
I thought about waking her.
But it was unnecessary.
There would be other nights.
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 ... It's always necessary. — Jonathan Safran Foer

In truth I was manufacturing a brick wall of shits. — Jonathan Safran Foer

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

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 just stood there, facing each other, but nine floors apart. — Jonathan Safran Foer

There's a Hasidic proverb: 'While we pursue happiness, we flee from contentment.'" Jacob — Jonathan Safran Foer

When you hide your face from the world, you can't see the world. — 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

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' was the last word I was able to speak aloud. I wanted to pull the thread, unravel the scarf of my silence and start again from the beginning, but instead I said, 'I.' I know I'm not alone in this disease, you hear the old people in the street and some of them are moaning, "Ay yay yay," but some of them are clinging to their last word, 'I,' they're saying, because they're desperate, it's not a complaint it's a prayer, and then I lost 'I' and my silence was complete. — Jonathan Safran 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

But I still couldn't figure out what it all meant. The more I found out, the less I understood. — 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

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

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

Only now do I understand the war against boredom, the lost cause of empty hours, of empty days and nights. — 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

I need an office, so I can have a place where I don't write. — Jonathan Safran Foer

She is deranged, but so so playful. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Only someone who'd never been an animal would put up a sign saying not to feed them ... — 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 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

But he also knew that there is an inflationary aspect to love, and that should his mother, or Rose, or any of those who loved him find out about each other, they would not be able to help but feel of lesser value. He knew that I love you also means, I love you more than anyone loves you, or has loved you, or will live you, and also, I love you in a way that no one loves you, or has loved you, or will love you,and also, I love you in a way that I love no one else, and never have loved anyone else, and never will love anyone else. He knew that it is, by love's definition, impossible to love two people. — 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

The best books are the ones that ask the most questions. — 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

Just about every children's book in my local bookstore has an animal for its hero. But then, only a few feet away in the cookbook section, just about every cookbook includes recipes for cooking animals. Is there a more illuminating illustration of our paradoxical relationship with the nonhuman world? — 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

Maybe great books were coiled within him like springs, books that could have separated inside from outside. — 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

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

Nothing is beautiful and true. — 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

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

I asked her why she was getting so upset about such a small thing. She said, 'It doesn't feel small to me. — Jonathan Safran Foer

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

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

When the three of us, the three men named Alex, gathered in Father's house that night to converse the journey, Grandfather said, I do not want to do it. I am retarded, and I did not become a retarded person in order to have to perform shit such as this. I am done with it. — 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

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

Years were passing through the spaces between moments. — 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 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

In another place, their sons were killed between the barbs of their own guard wire, killed with misfired bombs while squirming in the mire like animals, killed with friendly fire, killed sometimes without knowing that they were about to die - a bullet through the head while joking with a comrade, laughing — 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

Life is scarier than death. — Jonathan Safran Foer

It is better to lose than never to have had. — Jonathan Safran Foer

I spent my life learning to feel less. Every day I felt less. Is that growing old? Or is it something worse? You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.
Foer, Jonathan Safran (2006-04-04). Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel (Kindle Locations 1882-1883). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition. — 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

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

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

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

What about a teakettle? What if the spout opened and closed when the steam came out, so it would become a mouth, and it could whistle pretty melodies, or do Shakespeare, or just crack up with me? I could invent a teakettle that reads in Dad's voice, so I could fall asleep, or maybe a set of kettles that sings the chorus of "Yellow Submarine," which is a song by the Beatles, who I love, because entomology is one of my raisons d'etre, which is a French expression that I know. — 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

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

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 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

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

THE PROBLEM OF EVIL: WHY UNCONDITIONALLY BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO UNCONDITIONALLY GOOD PEOPLE
They never do. — 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

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

There are more places you haven't heard of then you're heard of!' I loved that — 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

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, USDA inspectors had to condemn any bird with such fecal contamination. But about thirty years ago, the poultry industry convinced the USDA to reclassify feces so that it could continue to use these automatic eviscerators. Once a dangerous contaminant, feces are now classified as a cosmetic blemish. — 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

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

Wings of a half finished book across his chest. — 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

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 could write more, but that is all that matters. — 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

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

There's never been a culture that wasn't obsessed with food. The sort of sad thing is that our obsession is no longer with food, but with the price of food. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Is that growing old? Or is it something worse? — Jonathan Safran Foer

I'm possibly possible. — Jonathan Safran Foer

She brushed her eyelashes against his chest. — 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

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

My bat mitzvah portion is about many things, but I think it is primarily about who we are wholly there for, and how that, more than anything else, defines our identity. — 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

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