Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

287 Sourced Quotes

When you look up 'hilarious' in the dictionary, there's a picture of you.

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

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
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 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. 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, Oskar. It's always necessary. I love you. Grandma.

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

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

Jonathan Safran Foer
But more than that, no unloving words were ever spoken, and everything was held up as another small piece of proof that it can be this way, it doesn't have to be that way; if there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it heavy walls, and we will furnish it with soft red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweler's felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does.

Jonathan Safran Foer
I can't even say 'hair pie,'' I told him, 'unless I'm talking about an actual pie made out of rabbits....

Jonathan Safran Foer
I could not believe in a God that would challenge faith like this.

Jonathan Safran Foer
[...]It is as if after surviving so much, there was no longer reason to survive.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Everything is the way it is because everything was the way it was. Sometimes I feel ensnared in this, as if no matter what I do, what will come has already been fixed.

Jonathan Safran Foer
I watched the sheets breathe when she breathed, like how Dad used to say that trees inhale when people exhale, because I was too young to understand the truth about biological processes.

Jonathan Safran Foer
It was the first time I had ever made love. I wondered if he knew that. It felt like crying. I wondered, Why does anyone ever make love?

Jonathan Safran Foer
We are lying to ourselves and to each other. Lying about what? I don't care if we're lying. I am a bad person. I don't care. I don't care what you are.

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
What is being awake if not interpreting our dreams, or dreaming if not interpreting our wake?

Jonathan Safran Foer
Also, I designed a pretty fascinating bracelet, where you put a rubber band around your favorite book of poems for a year, and then you take it off and wear it.

Jonathan Safran Foer