Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

I've never particularly liked bankers.

Time was passing like a hand waving from a train I wanted to be on. I hope you never have to think about anything as much as I think about you.

The hardest part of writing is not to get the ideas but to remember, why it is important to get them.

No matter how much I feel, I’m not going to let it out. If I have to cry, I’m gonna cry on the inside. If I have to bleed, I’ll bruise. If my heart starts going crazy, I’m not gonna tell everyone in the world about it. It doesn’t help anything. It just makes everyone’s life worse.

Living on a planet of fixed size requires compromise, and while we are the only party capable of negotiating, we are not the only party at the table. We've never claimed more, and we've never had less.

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.

How would you judge an artist who mutilated animals in a gallery because it was visually arresting? How riveting would the sound of a tortured animal need to be to make you want to hear it that badly? Try to imagine any end other than taste for which it would be justifiable to do what we do to farmed animals.

Factory farmers talk about their desire to feed the world. That's not what they're doing. They're feeding the world with really, really cheap stuff.

Feathers filled the small room. Our laughter kept the feathers in the air. I thought about birds. Could they fly is there wasn't someone, somewhere, laughing?

But when, at the end of my sophomore year, I became a philosophy major and started doing my first seriously pretentious thinking, I became a vegetarian again. The kind of willful forgetting that I was sure meat eating required felt too paradoxical to the intellectual life I was trying to shape. I thought life could, should, and must conform to the mold of reason. You can imagine how annoying this made me.

Oh,' she said. 'I have never seen a Jew before. Can I see his horns?

It would be refreshing to have a politician try to defend guns without any reference to the Second Amendment, but on the merits of guns.

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.

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

The more exposure people have to the realities of factory farming, the more we will see people rejecting it. It's already happening.

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.

I'm not funny. People assume that because my books are funny, I'll be funny in real life. It's the inevitable disappointment of meeting me.

Every factory-farmed animal is, as a practice, treated in ways that would be illegal if it were a dog or a cat.

I need an office, so I can have a place where I don't write.

People who want to find a place of rest, want to find an integrated personality, sense of self, want fewer fractures in their lives.

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.

My impression is that staying together as a couple does not correspond to the challenges themselves, but whether the very idea of breaking up is an option on the table. If it is, then some people take it. If it's not, then they will keep working at it. You must know people who were terribly suited who make it work. And there are couples who seem perfectly suited that break up. It's a mystery to everyone.

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

Oh, I'd say I like a meal as much as anybody. But I find a certain kind of foodiness silly, gluttonous and embarrassing.

....Worthy would-be worlds of words, whorls of working wonder.

He was not such a special person. He loved to read very much, and also to write. He was a poet, and he exhibited me many of his poems. I remember many of them. They were silly, you could say, and about love. He was always in his room writing those things, and never with people. I used to tell him, What good is all that love doing on paper? I said, Let love write on you for a little. But he was so stubborn. Or perhaps he was only timid.

And yet and yet - the last secret of the tree of codes is that nothing can ever reach a definite conclusion. Nowhere as much as there do we feel possibilities shaken by the nearness of realization. The atmosphere becomes possibilities and we shall wander and make a thousand mistakes. We shall wander along yet not be able to understand.

If it weren't my life, I wouldn't have believed it.

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.

You can make great meals without meat that are, of course, much more healthy for the same price, but it takes a process of reeducation, just because Americans aren't familiar with how to cook vegetables anymore.

Even if I don't like what I am, I know what I am. My children like what they are, but they don't know what they are. So tell me which is worse.

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?

I wanted to hit him. I wanted to hold him. I wanted to shout myself into his ear.

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.

...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.

Consumers are going to have get used to eating less meat - to paying more for better quality meat and eating significantly less of it.

I love sushi, I love fried chicken, I love steak. But there is a limit to my love.

She said, 'Believe it or not, I used to be idealistic.' I asked her what 'idealistic' meant. 'It means you live by what you think is right.' 'You don't do that anymore?' 'There are questions I don't ask anymore.

and i wouldn't say no to something sweet.

I flipped back through the pad of paper while I thought about what Stephen Hawking would do next.

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.

Sometimes you have to put your fears in order.

I have so much to say to you. I want to begin at the beginning, because that is what you deserve. I want to tell you everything, without leaving out a single detail. But where is the beginning? And what is everything?

Well, let me leave it at this: if God does exist, He would have a great deal be sad about. And if He doesn’t exist, then that too would make Him quite sad, I imagine. So to answer your question, God must be sad.

I wanted to tell her everything, maybe if I'd been able to, we could have lived differently, maybe I'd be there with you now instead of here. Maybe... if I'd said, 'I'm so afraid of losing something I love that I refuse to love anything,' maybe that would have made the impossible possible. Maybe, but I couldn't do it, I had buried too much too deeply inside me. And here I am, instead of there.

Each day has been chained to the previous one. But the weeks have wings. Anyone who believes that a second is faster than a decade did not live my life.

Words are capable of making experience more vivid, and also of organizing it. They can scare us, and they can comfort us.

(You do not have to be shamed in my closeness. Family are the people who must never make you feel ashamed.) (You are wrong. Family are the people who must make you feel ashamed when you are deserving of shame.) (And you are deserving of shame?) (I am. I am trying to tell you.) 'We were stupid,' he said, 'because we believed in things.' 'Why is this stupid?' 'Because there are not things to believe in.' (Love?) (There is no love. Only the end of love.) (Goodness?) (Do not be a fool.) (God?) (If God exists, He is not to be believed in.)