Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

The UN special envoy on food called it a 'crime against humanity' to funnel 100 million tons of grain and corn to ethanol when almost a billion people are starving. So what kind of crime is animal agriculture, which uses 756 million tons of grain and corn per year, much more than enough to adequately feed the 1.4 billion human who are living in dire poverty?

And the general shot my sister. I could not look at her, but I remember the sound of when she hit the ground. I hear that sound when things hit the ground still. Anything.' If I could, I would make it so nothing ever hit the ground again.

And also, there are so many times when you need to make a quick escape, but humans don't have their own wings, or not yet, anyway, so what about a birdseed shirt?

There is a glaring reason that the necessary total ban on nontherapeutic use of antibiotics hasn't happened: The factory farm industry, allied with the pharmaceutical industry, has more power than public-health professionals.

I put my hand on the doorknob because I thought maybe her hand was on the doorknob on the other side.

My point is that there are a lot of forces, like the media and the general political rhetoric tells us we should have more. That we should do better than our parents and have a bigger house or a better car.

Succotash my Balzac, dipshiitake.

I am willing to be annoying if that's what was necessary.

I started carrying blank books like this one around, which I would fill with all the things I couldn't say.

If people thought about food more like how we think about the environment, a lot of people would be eating differently and the whole system would look a lot different.

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?

Which, then, brings us closer to what we want to communicate: saying what we intend, or trying to say the opposite?

So many people enter and leave your life! Hundreds of thousands of people! You have to keep the door open so they can come in! But it also means you have to let them go!

Everyone performs bad actions... A bad person is someone who does not lament his bad actions.

The only thing worse than being sad is for others to know you are sad.

Feeding my children is not like feeding myself: it matters more.

Writing's funny, it's like walking down a hall in the dark looking for the light switch, and suddenly you find it, flip it on, and then you discover the hallway you passed through is papered with the novel you've written.

There's nothing good about being certain about things. And I don't think there's any real talent in using language in a manipulative way, with phrases like "tax relief" or "Social Security reform." It's politically clever, but it's also completely disingenuous, and it's not something to aspire to.

I want an infinitely blank book and the rest of time.

Tomorrow was over the horizon, and would take an entire day to reach.

Once you hear something, you can never return to the time before you heard it.

Suddenly Yankel was overcome with a fear of dying, stronger than he felt when his parents passed of natural causes, stronger than when his only brother was killed in the flour mill or when his children died, stronger even than when he was a child and it first occurred to him that he must try to understand what it could mean not to be alive -- to be not in darkness, not in unfeeling -- to be not being, not to be.

People around the world were moving from one place to another. No one was staying.

Part of living your life is an awareness of the opportunities that can be missed and an awareness that time moves in one direction.

The dissolution of a family, global crisis creates the massive fracture, not only in the Middle East but between America and Israel, between Europe and Israel, between American Jews and Israeli Jews. The distances seem to be widening wherever you look.

She maintained a careful balance by her window, never allowing the men to come too close, never allowing them to stray too far.

When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much.

I would have done anything for him. Maybe that was my sickness.

If the thrill of hunting were in the hunt, or even in the marksmanship, a camera would do just as well.

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

And she would say, "Today you believe in God?" And he would say, "Today I believe in love".

SADNESSES OF THE INTELLECT: Sadness of being misunderstood [sic]; Humor sadness; Sadness of love wit[hou]t release; Sadne[ss of be]ing smart; Sadness of not knowing enough words to [express what you mean]; Sadness of having options; Sadness of wanting sadness; Sadness of confusion; Sadness of domes[tic]ated birds; Sadness of fini[shi]ng a book; Sadness of remembering; Sadness of forgetting; Anxiety sadness.

Fiction works when it makes a reader feel something strongly.

For a long time, I thought I would like to be a doctor. Such a good profession. So explicitly good. Never a waste of time.

It was one of the best days of my life, a day during which I lived my life and didn't think about my life at all.

Dear Anna, we will live in a home with no walls, so that everywhere we go will be our home.

I looked at everyone and wondered where they came from, and who they missed, and what they were sorry for.

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.

I realized that your mother couldn't see the emptiness, she couldn't see anything...All of the words I'd written to her over all of those years, had I never said anything to hear at all?

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

I often think about how my sons will come to know about September 11th. Something overheard? A newspaper image? In school? I would prefer that they learn about it from my wife and me, in a deliberate and safe way. But it's hard to imagine ever feeling ready to broach the subject without some impetus.

I asked my schoolmate Mary to write a letter to me. She was funny and full of life. She liked to run around her empty house without any clothes on, even once she was too old for that. Nothing embarrassed her. I admired that so much, because everything embarrassed me, and that hurt me. She loved to jump on her bed. She jumped on her bed for so many years that one afternoon, while I watched her jump, the seams burst. Feathers filled the small room. Our laughter kept the feathers in the air. I thought about birds. Could they fly if there wasn’t someone, somewhere, laughing?

Why do I write? It's not that I want people to think I am smart, or even that I am a good writer. I write because I want to end my loneliness.

... the man took my passport and asked me the purpose of my visit, I wrote in my daybook, 'To mourn,' and then, 'To try to live,' he gave me a look and asked if I would consider that business or pleasure, I wrote, 'Neither.' 'For how long do you plan to mourn and try to live?' I wrote, 'For the rest of my life.

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

I always write out of a need to read something, rather than a need to write something.

She was not crying Which surprised me very much But I understand now That she had found places For her melancholy That were behind more masks Than only her eyes

She was so beautiful, like someone who you will never meet, but always dream of meeting, like someone who is too good for you.