Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

287 Sourced Quotes

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
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 was leaving me. I wondered if I should stop him. If I should wrestle him to the ground and force him to love me. I wanted to hold his shoulders down and shout into his face.

Jonathan Safran Foer
The Eskimos have four hundred words for snow, and the Jewshave four hundred for schmuck.

Jonathan Safran Foer
She had fallen in love so many times that she began to suspect she was not falling in love at all, but doing something much more ordinary.

Jonathan Safran Foer
We need a better way to talk about eating animals, a way that doesn't ignore or even just shruggingly accept things like habits, cravings, family and history but rather incorporates them into the conversation. The more they are allowed in, the more able we will be to follow our best instincts.

Jonathan Safran Foer
She was a genius of sadness, immersing herself in it, separating its numerous strands, appreciating its subtle nuances. She was a prism through which sadness could be divided into its infinite spectrum.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Ray Black was in prison, so we weren't able to talk to him. I did some research on the internet and found out that he was in prison because he murdered two children after he raped them. There were also pictures of the dead children, and even though I knew it would only hurt me to look at them, I did. I printed them out and put them in *Stuff That Happened To Me*, right after the picture of Jean-Pierre Haigneré, the french astronaut who had to be carried from his spacecraft after returning form the MIR spacestation, because gravity isn't only what makes us fall, it's what makes our muscles strong.

Jonathan Safran Foer
It's so beautiful at this hour. The sun is low, the shadows are long, the air is cold and clean. You won't be awake for another five hours, but I can't help feeling that we're sharing this clear and beautiful morning.

Jonathan Safran Foer
The factory farm has succeeded by divorcing people from their food, eliminating farmers, and ruling agriculture by corporate fiat.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Because he had been waiting for someone to come back to him, so every time someone knocked on the door, he couldn't stop himself from hoping it might be that person, even though he knew he shouldn't hope.

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
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
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
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
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
There were things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him, so I buried them, and let them hurt me.

Jonathan Safran Foer
We cracked up together, which was necessary, because she loved me again.

Jonathan Safran Foer