Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes
I wouldn't want a boy to think I was pretty unless he was the kind of boy who thought I was pretty.
People around the world were moving from one place to another. No one was staying.
I know you look both ways before you cross the street, but I want you to look both ways a second time, because I told you to.
But what she was really trying to say was this: I like music better than anything in the world, after you.
I zipped myself all the way into the sleeping bag of myself, not because I was hurt, and not because I had broken something, but because they were cracking up.
What is being awake if not interpreting our dreams, or dreaming if not interpreting our wake?
In the water I saw my father's face, and that face saw the face of its father, and so on, and so on, reflecting backward to the beginning of time, to the face of God, in whose image we were created.
Literature was the only religion her father practiced, when a book fell on the floor he kissed it, when he was done with a book he tried to give it away to someone who would love it.
Just because you're an atheist, that doesn't mean you wouldn't love for things to have reasons for why they are.
I spent my life learning to feel less. Every day I felt less. Is that growing old? Or is it something worse? You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.
People who want to find a place of rest, want to find an integrated personality, sense of self, want fewer fractures in their lives.
It is unrealistic to think you can have an inflexible identity that never has to give or take or make compromises.
Marriage is like a chess match is initiated and the board expands over time until it takes up all of a life.
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.
My test for writing is always, is this fun or does it feel like a job? Is it moving me? Or am I just fulfilling my own expectations - or even worse, somebody else's?
The books could be completely worthless, and things we don't even read now could be considered the most important books.
I'm deeply curious about Jewish things. I've toyed around with the idea of going to rabbinical school.
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.
Our relationship to the environment matters, our relationship to animals matters, and our relationship to culture matters.
I want an infinitely blank book and the rest of time......why didn't I learn to treat everything like it was the last time, my greatest regret is how much I believed in the future.
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?
Because sometimes people who seem goodend up being not as good as you might have hoped.
Highs and lows make you feel that things matter, but they're nothing.
There are worse things, worse than being like us. Look, at least we're alive.
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.
Between any two beings there is a unique, uncrossable distance, an unenterable sanctuary. Sometimes it takes the shape of aloneness. Sometimes it takes the shape of love.
Anyone who believes that a second is faster than a decade did not live life.
So it had something to do with the sinner, and something with the judge, and the fear of not being forgiven, and the relief of being loved again.
Nothing goes away. Not on its own. You deal with it, or it deals with you.
No father knows that he is carrying his son up the stairs for the final time
AND IF WE ARE TO STRIVE FOR A BETTER FUTURE, MUSTN'T WE BE FAMILIAR AND RECONCILED WITH OUR PAST?
Not in all ways (of course), but the animals you know have power: they have abilities humans lack, could be dangerous, could bring life, mean things that mean things.
So many days in their shared life. So many experiences. How had they managed to spend the previous sixteen years unlearning each other? How had all the presence summed to disappearance?
As we drove, I imagined we were standing still and the world was coming toward us.
Sometimes my hand starts to burn and I am convinced we are writing the same word at the same moment.
