Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes
I thought, it's a shame that we have to live, but it's a tragedy that we get to live only one life, because if I'd had two lives, I would have spent one of them with her.
The paper, the stapler, the staples, the tape. It makes me sick. Physical things. Forty years of loving someone becomes staples and tape.
He was someone whom everyone admired and liked but whom nobody knew. He was like a book that you could feel good holding, that you could talk about without ever having read, that you could recommend.
There has yet to be a human to survive a span of history without at least one end of the world.
Grandfather kicked the stop pedal, and my face gave a high-five to the front window.
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?
Which, then, brings us closer to what we want to communicate: saying what we intend, or trying to say the opposite?
I saw Herschel and he saw me and we stood next to each other because that is what friends do in the presence of evil or love.
Since the world has changed so much, the same values don't lead to the same choices anymore.
I did not need to know if he could love me. I needed to know if he could need me.
Something having been done just about everywhere just about always is no kind of justification for doing it now.
What do babies dream of? She must be dreaming of the before-life, just as I dream of the afterlife.
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.
I write because I want to end my loneliness. Books make people less alone. That, before and after everything else, is what books do. They show us that conversations are possible across distances.
Oh, I'd say I like a meal as much as anybody. But I find a certain kind of foodiness silly, gluttonous and embarrassing.
It's rarely talked about, but hunting for sport is just about as vile as we humans get.
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.
Sometimes I can feel my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.
When it comes to meat, change is almost always cast as an absolute. You are a vegetarian or you are not.
It seems entirely possible to me that horrible things can be going on without us becoming horrible people.
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.
As I've grown older, I've grown more convinced there's nothing that shouldn't be talked about. If we think we're protecting each other, we're not.
Consumers are going to have get used to eating less meat - to paying more for better quality meat and eating significantly less of it.
It's a good rule of thumb, it seems to me: if you're not allowed to see where something comes from, don't put it in your mouth.
I'm interested in the kind of religion that makes life harder. I'm not so interested in the comforting kind of religion.
I want to talk about God in a literary way. But I think I would have a very hard time praying to God.
Food is not just what we put in our mouths to fill up; it is culture and identity. Reason plays some role in our decisions about food, but it's rarely driving the car.
I know lots and lots and lots of vegetarians who think it's perfectly all right to kill animals for food to eat, but don't do it because they think all the ways in which it's done are wrong.
I have made my own choice, which is vegetarianism, but it's not the choice I'm imposing on anybody else.
Few people sufficiently appreciate the colossal task of feeding a world of billions of omnivores who demand meat with their potatoes.
The end of suffering does not justify the suffering, and so there is no end to suffering.
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.
Family are the people who must make you feel ashamed when you are deserving of shame.
I wanted to hit him. I wanted to hold him. I wanted to shout myself into his ear.
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.
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.
Compassion is a muscle that gets stronger with use, and the regular exercise of choosing kindness over cruelty would change us.
