Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

287 Sourced Quotes

My dream went all the way back to the beginning. The rain rose into the clouds, and the animals descended the ramp.

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 can't count the times that upon telling someone I am vegetarian, he or she responded by pointing out an inconsistency in my lifestyle or trying to find a flaw in an argument I never made. (I have often felt that my vegetarianism matters more to such people than it does to me.)

Jonathan Safran Foer
"Stalin found out about the community and sent his thugs in, just a few days before I got there, to break all of their arms! That was worse than killing them! It was a horrible sight, Oskar: their arms in crude splints, straight in front of them like zombies! They couldn't feed themselves, because they couldn't get their hands to their mouths! So you know what they did!" "They starved?" "They fed each other! That's the difference between heaven and hell! In hell we starve! In heaven we feed each other!" I don't believe in the afterlife." "Neither do I, but I believe in the story."

Jonathan Safran Foer
I will describe my eyes and then begin the story. My eyes are blue and resplendent. Now I will begin the story.

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

Jonathan Safran Foer
They learned to hate her unknowability, her untouchability, the collage of her.

Jonathan Safran Foer
We believed in our grandmother's cooking more fervently than we believed in God.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Why didn't he say goodbye? I gave myself a bruise. Why didn't he say 'I love you'?

Jonathan Safran Foer
This is the sixty-nine," I told him, presenting the magazine in front of him. I put my fingers — two of them — on the action, so that he would not overlook it. "Why is it dubbed sixty-nine?" he asked, because he is a person hot on fire with curiosity. "It was invented in 1969. My friend Gregory knows a friend of the nephew of the inventor." "What did people do before 1969?" "Merely blowjobs and masticating box, but never in chorus.

Jonathan Safran Foer
I said I kicked a French chicken in the stomach once." "Huh?" "It said, 'Oeuf.'" "What is that?" "It's a joke. Do you want to hear another, or have you already had un oeuf?

Jonathan Safran Foer
I said, 'I need to know how he died.' He flipped back and pointed at, 'Why?' So I can stop inventing how he died. I'm always inventing.

Jonathan Safran Foer
She died in my arms saying, "I don't want to die." That is what death is like. It doesn't matter what uniforms the soldiers are wearing. It doesn't matter how good the weapons are. I thought if everyone could see what I saw, we could never have war anymore.

Jonathan Safran Foer
And here I am, instead of there. I'm sitting in this library, thousands of miles from my life, writing another letter I know I won't be able to send, no matter how hard I try and how much I want to. How did that boy making love behind that shed become this man writing this letter at this table?

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
She wanted more, more slang, more figures of speech, the bee's knees, the cats pajamas, horse of a different color, dog-tired, she wanted to talk like she was born here, like she never came from anywhere else

Jonathan Safran Foer
We aren't exactly emptying the oceans; it's more like clear-cutting a forest with thousands of species to create massive fields with one type of soybean.

Jonathan Safran Foer
She repeats things until they are true, or until she can't tell whether they are true or not. She has become an expert at confusing what is with what was with what should be with what could be.

Jonathan Safran Foer
A few weeks after the worst day, I started writing lots of letters. I don't know why, but it was one of the only things that made my boots lighter.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Because it was starting to get dark, and because the streets were crowded, I bumped into a googolplex people. Who were they? Where were they going? What were they looking for? I wanted to hear their heartbeats, and I wanted them to hear mine.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Grandfather kicked the stop pedal, and my face gave a high-five to the front window.

Jonathan Safran Foer
It might sound naive to suggest that whether you order a chicken patty or a veggie burger is a profoundly important decision. Then again, it certainly would have sounded fantastic if in the 1950's you were told that where you sat in a restaurant or on a bus could begin to uproot racism.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Mom said, "His spirit is there," and that made me really angry. I told her, "Dad didn't have a spirit! He had cells!" "His memory is there." "His memory is here," I said, pointing at my head. "Dad had a spirit," she said, like she was rewinding a bit in our conversation. I told her, "He had cells, and now they're on rooftops, and in the river, and in the lungs of millions of people around New York, who breathe him every time they speak!

Jonathan Safran Foer
The bruises go away, and so does how you hate, and so does the feeling that everything you receive from life is something you have earned.

Jonathan Safran Foer
It took me as long as I had known him to get rid of all of his words. Like turning an hourglass over.

Jonathan Safran Foer
When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own.

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