Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

287 Sourced Quotes

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
I realized I was on a something island. 'How did I get here,' I wondered, surrounded by Nothing, "and how can I get back?

Jonathan Safran Foer
He had a wall of masks from every country he'd been to, like Armenia and Chile and Ethiopia. It's not a horrible world, he told me, but it's filled with a lot of horrible people.

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
I wanted to touch him, to tell him that even if everyone left everyone, I would never leave him, he talked and talked, his words fell through him, trying to find the floor to his sadness.

Jonathan Safran Foer
She laughed enough to migrate an entire flock of birds. That was how she said yes

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

Jonathan Safran Foer
"You do not have to present not-truths to me, Sasha. I am not a child."(But I do. That is what you always fail to understand. I present not-truths in order to protect you. That is also why I try so inflexibly to be a funny person. Everything is to protect you. I exist in case you need to be protected.)

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 can not protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.

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
Isn't it so weird how the number of dead people is increasing even though the Earth stays the same size, so that one day there isn't going to be room to bury anyone anymore?

Jonathan Safran Foer
Needless to say, jamming deformed, drugged, overstressed birds together in a filthy, waste-coated room is not very healthy. Beyond deformities, eye damage, blindness, bacterial infections of bones, slipped vertebrae, paralysis, internal bleeding, anemia, slipped tendons, twisted lower legs and necks, respiratory diseases, and weakened immune systems are frequent and long-standing problems on factory farms.

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
He Wrote, Are you OK? I told him, My eyes are crummy. He wrote, But are you OK? I told him, That's a very complicated question. He wrote, That's a very simple answer. I asked, Are you OK? He wrote, Some mornings I wake up feeling grateful.

Jonathan Safran Foer
It would be possible, in theory, for life and art to be reversed.

Jonathan Safran Foer
"It's easy to be emotional. You can always make a scene... Highs and lows make you feel that things matter, but they're nothing." "So what's something?" "Being reliable is something. Being good."

Jonathan Safran Foer
I felt that night, on the stage, incredibly close to everything in the universe, but also extremely alone. I wondered, for the first time in my life, if life was worth all the work it took to live. What exactly made it worth it? What's so horrible about being dead forever, and not feeling anything, and not even dreaming? What's so great about feeling and dreaming?

Jonathan Safran Foer
I flipped back through the pad of paper while I thought about what Stephen Hawking would do next.

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
Tomorrow was over the horizon, and would take an entire day to reach.

Jonathan Safran Foer
I would have done anything for him. Maybe that was my sickness.

Jonathan Safran Foer
She wrote, I wish I could be a girl again, with a chance to live my life again. I have suffered so much more than I needed to. And the joys I have felt have not always been joyous. I could have lived differently.

Jonathan Safran Foer
It was terrible. All of the things we couldn't share. The room was filled with conversations we weren't having.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Thanksgiving is the holiday that encompasses all others. All of them, from Martin Luther King Day to Arbor Day to Christmas to Valentine's Day, are in one way or another about being thankful.

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