Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

287 Sourced Quotes

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
I'm so afraid of losing something I love, that I refuse to love anything.

Jonathan Safran Foer
It's the tragedy of loving, you can't love anything more than something you miss.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Family are the people who must make you feel ashamed when you are deserving of shame.

Jonathan Safran Foer
The philosopher Elaine Scarry has observed that "beauty always takes place in the particular." Cruelty, on the other hand, prefers abstraction.

Jonathan Safran Foer
I know you look both ways before you cross the street, but I want you to look both ways a second time, because I told you to.

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
I got tired, I told him. Not worn out, but worn through. Like one of those wives who wakes up one morning and says I can't bake any more bread.

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

Jonathan Safran Foer
I never thought about things at all, everything changed, the distance that wedged itself between me and my happiness wasn't the world, it wasn't the bombs and burning buildings, it was me, my thinking, my cancer of never letting go, is ignorance bliss, I don't know, but it's so painful to think, and tell me, what did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever bring me? I think and think and think, I've thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.

Jonathan Safran Foer
The images of his infinite pasts and infinite futures washed over him as he waited, paralyzed, in the present.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Whether we're talking about fish species, pigs, or some other eaten animal, is such suffering the most important thing in the world? Obviously not. But that's not the question. Is it more important that sushi, bacon, or chicken nuggets? That's the question.

Jonathan Safran Foer
I hated myself for going, why couldn't I be the kind of person who stays?

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
When I looked at you, my life made sense. Even the bad things made sense. They were necessary to make you possible.

Jonathan Safran Foer
I brought the birdcages to the windows. I opened the windows, and opened the birdcages. I poured the fish down the drain. I took the dogs and cats downstairs and removed their collars. I released the insects onto the street. And the reptiles. And the mice. I told them, Go. All of you. Go. And they went. And they didn't come back

Jonathan Safran Foer
Dogs are wonderful, and in many ways unique. But they are remarkably unremarkable in their intellectual and experiential capacities. Pigs are every bit as intelligent and feeling, by any sensible definition of the words. They can't hop into the back of a Volvo, but they can fetch, run and play, be mischievous, and reciprocate affection. So why don't they get to curl up by the fire? Why can't they at least be spared being tossed on the fire?

Jonathan Safran Foer