Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

The world is a big place," he said, "but so is the inside of an apartment!

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

I try not to remember the life that I didn’t want to lose but lost and have to remember

Be the instrument playing the sound of your life's passing

If it had and answer, it wouldn't really be love, would it?

Food for her is not food, it is terror, dignity, gratitude, vengeance, joyfulness, humiliation, religion, history, and, of course, love. As if the fruit she always offered us were picked from the destroyed brances of out family tree.

I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live.

One of the greatest opportunities to live our values-or betray them-lies in the food we put on our plates.

They do not desire anything more than everything they have known.

Of course food has an important cultural use in families, but there are things that have more important cultural uses in families, and broadening the conversation out simply from what's reasonable also allows in other things.

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

In America right now, we use words like 'smart' to talk about bombs. American rhetoric is grounded in ideas of capital-G Good, capital-E Evil, and it's very clear who is on which side. But in a book you can do just the opposite. You can use all lower-case words.

Can’t you even tell me if I’m on the right track?" Buckminster purred, and Dad shrugged his shoulders again. "But if you don’t tell me anything, how can I ever be right?" He circled something in an article and said, "Another way of looking at it would be, how could you ever be wrong?

We've made science experiments of ourselves and our children.

The secret was a hole in the middle of me that every happy thing fell into.

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.

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.

Why does watching a dog be a dog fill one with happiness?

Few people sufficiently appreciate the colossal task of feeding a world of billions of omnivores who demand meat with their potatoes.

I felt, that night, on that stage, under that skull, 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?

People don’t care enough. They don’t get worked up enough. They don’t get angry enough. They don’t get passionate enough. I’d rather somebody hate what I do than be indifferent to it.

Everything is to protect you. I exist in case you need to be protected.

It's rarely talked about, but hunting for sport is just about as vile as we humans get.

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

The sky slowly pulled up its blue dress to reveal night.

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.

There's nothing wrong with not understanding yourself.

In my family, Father is the world champion at ending conversations.

Sadness of not knowing enough words to [express what you mean].

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.

One day you will do things for me that you hate. That is what it means to be family.

She extended a hand that I didn't know how to take, so I broke its fingers with my silence.

I spent my life learning to feel less. Every day I felt less. Is that growing old? Or is it something worse? You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.

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

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

I am not a bad person. I am a good person who has lived in a bad time." Alex's grandfather..Everything is Illuminated

Ironically, the utterly unselective omnivore -- "I'm easy; I'll eat anything" -- can appear more socially sensitive than the individual who tries to eat in a way that is good for society.

In the past seven years of love-making he had heard the words "I love you" so many times: from the mouths of widows and children, from prostitutes, family friends, travelers, and adulterous wives. Women said "I love you" without his ever speaking. "The more you love someone," he came to think, "the harder it is to tell them." It surprised him that strangers didn't stop each other on the street to say "I love you".

I ran rather than walked, anxious to lose my way. All I wanted was to be unsure.

I thought for a minute, and then I got heavy, heavy boots.

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

Almost always when I told someone I was writing a book about "eating animals", they assumed, even without knowing anything about my views, that it was a case for vegetarianism. It's a telling assumption, one that implies not only that a thorough inquiry into animal agriculture would lead one away from eating meat, but that most people already know that to be the case.

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.

But I knew the truth and that's why I was so sad. Every moment before this one depends on this one. Everything in the history of the world can be proven wrong in one moment.

Am I such a bad person for dreaming of a world that ends when I do? I don't mean the world ending with respect to me, but every set of eyes closing with mine.

In the end, everyone loses everyone. There was no invention to get around that.

I'm a novelist, I'm not an activist. I'm not a non-fiction writer, I'm not a journalist. I'm not a foodie, I'm not even really an animal person, or an environmentalist. I did the best I could with this, but it's not who I am.

I want to talk about God in a literary way. But I think I would have a very hard time praying to God.