Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

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

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.

I felt suddenly shy. I was not used to shy. I was used to shame. 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.

Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does.

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

We spent our lives making livings.

I imagine a line, a white line, painted on the sand and on the ocean, from me to you.

He promised us that everything would be okay. I was a child, but I knew that everything would not be okay. That did not make my father a liar. It made him my father.

Do you eat chicken because you are familiar with the scientific literature on them and have decided that their suffering doesn't matter, or do you do it because it tastes good?

Highs and lows make you feel that things matter, but they're nothing." "So what's something?" "Being reliable is something. Being good.

But come. No explaining or mending. Be beside me somewhere.

The French, who love their dogs, sometimes eat their horses. The Spanish, who love their horses, sometimes eat their cows. The Indians, who love their cows, sometimes eat their dogs.

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

We live in a world made up more of story than stuff. We are creatures of memory more than reminders, of love more than likes.

Words never mean what we want them to mean.

I spent my life learning to feel less.

Not responding is a response--we are equally responsible for what we don't do. In the case of animal slaughter, to throw your hands in the air is to wrap your fingers around a knife handle.

She let out a laugh, and then she put her hand over her mouth, like she was angry at herself for forgetting her sadness.

She was like a drowning person, flailing, reaching for anything that might save her. Her life was an urgent, desperate struggle to justify her life.

...people with nothing to declare carry the most.

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

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.

Let love write on you for awhile.

Factory farming, of course, does not cause all the world's problems, but is is remarkable just how many of them intersect there.

It broke my heart into more pieces than my heart was made of, why can't people say what they mean at the time?

We believed in our grandmother’s cooking more fervently than we believed in God.

The writing itself is no big deal. The editing, and even more than that, the self-doubt, is excruciatingly impossible.

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.

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

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.

If we communicated with something like music, we would never be misunderstood, because there is nothing in music to understand.

All really great artists, Jackson Pollack, John Cage, Beckett or Joyce - you are never indifferent to them.

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.

I see myself as someone who makes things. Definitions have never done anything but constrain.

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.

In the morning, when the nothing vase casts a something shadow, like the memory of someone you've lost, what can you say about that?

I've never particularly liked bankers.

Profound, bottomless self-doubt - it has no value - what's the point? In a way, it takes up as much time as anything else.

I do think ordinariness is, in a way, the enemy, but not ordinariness as the opposite of flamboyance.

Cruelty depends on an understanding of cruelty, and the ability to choose against it. Or to choose to ignore it.

I’d rather somebody hate what I do than be indifferent to it.

Memory was supposed to fill the time, but it made time a hole to be filled.

One hundred years of joy can be erased in one second

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

What's so horrible about being dead forever, and not feeling anything, and not even dreaming? What's so great about feeling and dreaming?

I'm sorry for my inability to let unimportant things go, for my inability to hold on to the important things.

August has passed, and yet summer continues by force to grow days. They sprout secretly between the chapters of the year, covertly included between its pages.

While it is always possible to wake a person who's sleeping, no amount of noise will wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.

I felt, that night, on that stage, under that skull, incredibly close to everything in the universe, but also extremely alone.

As long as I am thinking, I am alive.