Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

...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.

I wanted to protect him, which I was sure I could do, even if I could not protect myself.

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

She avoids mirrors, and lifts a powerful telescope to find herself.

Everything I did, I did because I thought it was the correct thing to do… I am not a hero, it is true… But I am not a bad person, either.

Only now do I understand the war against boredom, the lost cause of empty hours, of empty days and nights.

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

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

I'd lost count of the disappointments.

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.

We eat as sons and daughters, as families, as communities, as generations, as nations, and increasingly as a globe. We can't stop our eating from radiating influence even if we want to.

Isn't it strange how upset people get about a few dozen baseball players taking growth hormones, when we're doing what we're doing to our food animals and feeding them to our children?

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

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

I wanted to touch him, to tell him that even if everyone left everyone, I would never leave him, he talked and talked, his words fell through him, trying to find the floor to his sadness.

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.

There is nothing wrong with compromising. Even if you compromise almost everything.

It was the first time I had ever made love. I wondered if he knew that. It felt like crying. I wondered, Why does anyone ever make love?

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

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

You're incredibly beautiful,' I told her, because she was fat, so I thought it would be an especially nice compliment, and also make her like me again, even though I was sexist.

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

It would be possible, in theory, for life and art to be reversed.

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

The images of his infinite pasts and infinite futures washed over him as he waited, paralyzed, in the present.

I am doing something I hate for you. This is what it means to be in love.

Everything is the way it is because everything was the way it was

She is deranged, but so so playful.

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

Only someone who'd never been an animal would put up a sign saying not to feed them.

Your dad didn't die, so I won't be able to explain it to you.

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

We shouldn't be intimidated by someone else's idea of perfection if it will prevent us from taking steps we actively want to take.

To remember my values, I need to lose certain tastes and find other handles for the memories that they once helped me carry.

These little daily choices that we're so used to thinking are irrelevant are the most important thing we do all day long.

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.

I desperately wish I had my tambourine with me now, because even after everything I'm still wearing heavy boots, and sometimes it helps to play a good beat

Do you have any coffee?'...'It stunts my growth, and I'm afraid of death.

What if I never stop inventing?

Succotash my cocker spaniel, you fudging crevasse-hole dipshiitake!

Sadness of love without release.

Isn't it so weird how the number of dead people is increasing even though the Earth stays the same size, so that one day there isn't going to be room to bury anyone anymore?

Was his death an essential stage in the continuation of his life?

I realized I was on a something island. 'How did I get here,' I wondered, surrounded by Nothing, "and how can I get back?

Instead of singing in the shower, I would write out the lyrics of my favourite songs, the ink would turn the water blue or red or green, and the music would run down my legs.

Chickens can do many things, but they cannot make sophisticated deals with humans.

[She] always knew he was a fiction but believed in him anyway.

...accepting the compromise of the way we have been, the way we are, and the way we will likely be...may we live together in unwavering love and good health, amen.

The philosopher Elaine Scarry has observed that "beauty always takes place in the particular." Cruelty, on the other hand, prefers abstraction.

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