Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

287 Sourced Quotes

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
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
Cruelty depends on an understanding of cruelty, and the ability to choose against it. Or to choose to ignore it.

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
Few people sufficiently appreciate the colossal task of feeding a world of billions of omnivores who demand meat with their potatoes.

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
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
Compassion is a muscle that gets stronger with use, and the regular exercise of choosing kindness over cruelty would change us.

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
Chickens can do many things, but they cannot make sophisticated deals with humans.

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
What? she said once to herself, and then once aloud, What? She felt a total displacement, like a spinning globe brought to a sudden halt by the light touch of a finger. How did she end up here, like this? How could there have been so much - so many moments, so many people and things, so many razors and pillows, timepieces and subtle coffins - without her being aware? How did her life live itself without her?

Jonathan Safran Foer
She spent the afternoon staring at their front door. "Waiting for someone?" Yankel asked. "What color is this?" He stood very close to the door, letting the end of his nose touch the peephole. He licked the wood and joked, "It certainly tastes like red." "Yes, it is red, isn't it?" "Seems so." She buried her head in her hands. "But couldn't it be just a bit more red?"

Jonathan Safran Foer
I dreamt four nights ago of clock hands descending from the universe like rain, of the moon as a green eye, of mirrors and insects, of a love that never withdrew. It was not the feeling of completeness that I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty.

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
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
I think it's very pretty. Can it be pretty if no one thinks it's pretty? I think it's pretty. If you're the only one? That's pretty pretty. And what about the boys? Don't you want them to think you're pretty? I wouldn't want a boy to think I was pretty unless he was the kind of boy who thought I was pretty.

Jonathan Safran Foer
And so it was when anyone tried to speak: their minds would become tangled in remembrance. Words became floods of thought with no beginning or end, and would drown the speaker before he could reach the life raft of the point he was trying to make. It was impossible to remember what one meant, what, after all of the words, was intended.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Just how destructive does a culinary preference have to be before we decide to eat something else?

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

Jonathan Safran Foer
Things were happening around us, but nothing was happening between us.

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
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 is my great hope that our paths, however long and winding, will cross again.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Oh,' she said. 'I have never seen a Jew before. Can I see his horns?

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
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
Imagine being served a plate of sushi. But this plate also holds all of the animals that were killed for your serving of sushi. The plate might have to be five feet across.

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
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