Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

287 Sourced Quotes

Time was passing like a hand waving from a train I wanted to be on. I hope you never think about anything as much as I think about you.

Jonathan Safran Foer
"Why do beautiful songs make you sad?" "Because they aren't true." "Never?" "Nothing is beautiful and true."

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
Not responding is a response—we are equally responsible for what we don't do. In the case of animal slaughter, to throw your hands in the air is to wrap your fingers around a knife handle.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Darling, You asked me to write you a letter, so I am writing you a letter. I do not know why I am writing you this letter, or what this letter is supposed to be about, but I am writing it nonetheless, because I love you very much and trust that you have some good purpose for having me write this letter. I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love. Your father

Jonathan Safran Foer
I try not to remember the life that I didn't want to lose but lost and have to remember

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
Shyness is when you turn your head away from something you want. Shame is when you turn your head away from something you do not want.

Jonathan Safran Foer
I started inventing things, and then I couldn't stop, like beavers, which I know about. People think they cut down trees so they can build dams, but in reality it's because their teeth never stop growing, and if they didn't constantly file them down by cutting through all of those trees, their teeth would start to grow into their own faces, which would kill them. That's how my brain was.

Jonathan Safran Foer
I thought, it's a shame that we have to live, but it's a tragedy that we get to live only one life, because if I'd had two lives, I would have spent one of them with her.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Silently the animal catches our glance. The animal looks at us, and whether we look away (from the animal, our plate, our concern, ourselves) or not, we are exposed. Whether we change our lives or do nothing, we have responded. To do nothing is to do something

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
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
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.

Jonathan Safran Foer
I didn't feel empty. I wished I'd felt empty.... I wanted to be empty like an overturned pitcher. But I was full like a stone.

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
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
By the standards of the international human rights community, the typical working conditions in America's slaughterhouses constitute human rights violations.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Memories are small prayers to God, if we believed in that sort of thing.

Jonathan Safran Foer
We talked about nothing in particular, but it felt like we were talking about the most important things...

Jonathan Safran Foer
I have no need for the past, I thought, like a child. I did not consider that the past might have a need for me.

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
What about little microphones? What if everyone swallowed them, and they played the sounds of our hearts through a little speaker...I wonder if everyone's hearts would start to beat at the same time.

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
I thought about all of the things that everyone ever says to each other, and how everyone is going to die, whether it's in a millisecond, or days, or months, or 76.5 years, if you were just born. Everything that's born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they're all on fire, and we're all trapped.

Jonathan Safran Foer