Jonathan Safran Foer quote: "Do you think I'm wonderful? she asked him one day as they leaned against the trunk of a petrified maple. No, he said. Why? Because so many girls are wonderful. I imagine hundreds of men have called their loves wonderful today, and it's only noon. You couldn't be something that hundreds of others are."

When a book remembers, we remember. It reminds you that you have a body. So many of the things we ma...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

But I knew the truth and that's why I was so sad. Every moment before this one depends on this one. ...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

She was a genius of sadness, immersing herself in it, separating its numerous strands, appreciating ...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

He awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as sim...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Why do beautiful songs make you sad?' 'Because they aren't true.' 'Never?' 'Nothing is beautiful and...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Time was passing like a hand waving from a train I wanted to be on.
I hope you never have to t...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Needless to say, jamming deformed, drugged, overstressed birds together in a filthy, waste-coated ro...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Elsewhere the paper notes that vegetarians and vegans (including athletes) 'meet and exceed requirem...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

I can't count the times that upon telling someone I am vegetarian, he or she responded by pointing o...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Perhaps in the back of our minds we already understand, without all the science I've discussed, that...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Why didn't I learn to treat everything like it was the last time. My greatest regret was how much I ...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

I feel too much. That's what's going on.' 'Do you think one can feel too much? Or just feel in the w...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Songs are as sad as the listener.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

(What are your ghosts like?)
(They are on the insides of the lids of my eyes.)
(This is al...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

I love you also means I love you more than anyone loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

I can forgive you for leaving, but not for coming back.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

However much we obfuscate or ignore it, we know that the factory farm is inhumane in the deepest sen...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Food is not rational. Food is culture, habit, craving and identity.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

It would be refreshing to have a politician try to defend guns without any reference to the Second A...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

I usually write away from home, in coffee shops, on trains, on planes, in friends' houses. I lik...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

There is an overabundance of rational reasons to say no to factory-farmed meat: It is the No. 1 caus...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

The French, who love their dogs, sometimes eat their horses. The Spanish, who love their horses, som...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Books are slow, books are quiet. The Internet is fast and loud.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

If the thrill of hunting were in the hunt, or even in the marksmanship, a camera would do just as we...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Food is not just what we put in our mouths to fill up; it is culture and identity. Reason plays some...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Words are capable of making experience more vivid, and also of organizing it. They can scare us, and...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Why do I write? It's not that I want people to think I am smart, or even that I am a good writer...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

When we talk about protecting our right to have guns, we are talking about protecting our right to s...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

We eat as sons and daughters, as families, as communities, as generations, as nations, and increasin...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

The more exposure people have to the realities of factory farming, the more we will see people rejec...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Jews have a special relationship to books, and the Haggadah has been translated more widely, and rep...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

I will never come around to the idea of an anthropomorphic God. I'm also uncomfortable with the ...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

I am an on-and-off vegetarian. Sometimes on, mostly off. I think it is better to be a vegetarian but...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Every factory-farmed animal is, as a practice, treated in ways that would be illegal if it were a do...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

In America right now, we use words like 'smart' to talk about bombs. American rhetoric is gr...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

The Torah is the foundational text for Jewish law, but the Haggadah is our book of living memory. We...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

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

Why does watching a dog be a dog fill one with happiness?
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

I think and think and think, I‘ve thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never onc...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Darling,
You asked me to write you a letter, so I am writing you a letter. I do not know why I ...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

I first became a vegetarian when I was nine, in response to an argument made by a radical babysitter...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

I see bad stuff on the street all the time that I don't do anything about. I do bad stuff myself...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Consumers are going to have get used to eating less meat - to paying more for better quality meat an...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

All really great artists, Jackson Pollack, John Cage, Beckett or Joyce - you are never indifferent t...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

I realized that your mother couldn't see the emptiness, she couldn't see anything...All of the words...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

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

The mistakes I've made are dead to me. But I can't take back the things I never did.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

I wanted to tell her everything, maybe if I'd been able to, we could have lived differently, maybe I...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

There is a glaring reason that the necessary total ban on nontherapeutic use of antibiotics hasn'...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

My wife and I have chosen to bring up our children as vegetarians. In another time or place, we migh...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Kids are a great analogy. You want your kids to grow up, and you don't want your kids to grow up...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Isn’t it so weird how the number of dead people is increasing even though the earth stays the same...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

I got tired, I told him. Not worn out, but worn through. Like one of those wives who wakes up one mo...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Why are you leaving me?
He wrote, I do not know how to live.
I do not know either but I am...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Humans are the only animal that blushes, laughs, has religion, wages war, and kisses with lips. So i...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Look, taste is clearly the crudest of our senses: this is scientifically, objectively factual. It is...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

It's so hard to express yourself.'
I understand this.'
I want to express myself.'
Th...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

People who care about animals tend to care about people. They don't care about animals to the ex...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Thomas! What are you doing!" and I gestured, "I thought this was Nothing," covering myself with one ...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Just about every children's book in my local bookstore has an animal for its hero. But then, onl...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

What about little microphones? What if everyone swallowed them, and they played the sounds of our he...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

I'm so afraid of losing something I love that I refuse to love anything
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

With writing, we have second chances.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

The philosopher Elaine Scarry has observed that "beauty always takes place in the particular." Cruel...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

So many people enter and leave your life! Hundreds of thousands of people! You have to keep the door...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

I thought, it's a shame that we have to live, but it's a tragedy that we get to live only one life, ...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

I'm sorry for my inability to let unimportant things go, for my inability to hold on to the importan...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

She wants to know if I love her, that's all anyone wants from anyone else, not love itself but the k...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Because sometimes people who seem good
end up being not as good as you might have hoped.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

I wanted to touch him, to tell him that even if everyone left everyone, I would never leave him, he ...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Feathers filled the small room. Our laughter kept the feathers in the air. I thought about birds. Co...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

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

I never confused what I had with what I was.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

I took the world into me, rearranged it, and sent it back out as a question: "Do you like me?
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

I felt, that night, on that stage, under that skull, incredibly close to everything in the universe,...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Just because you're an atheist, that doesn't mean you wouldn't love for things to have reasons for w...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

In bed that night I invented a special drain that would be underneath every pillow in New York, and ...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

What did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever bring me? I think and think ...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

We need enormous pockets, pockets big enough for our families and our friends, and even the people w...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

We had everything to say to each other, but no ways to say it
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

I missed you even when I was with you. That’s been my problem. I miss what I already have, and I s...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

My life story is the story of everyone I've ever met.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

There were things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him. So I buried them, and let th...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someon...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

I like to see people reunited, I like to see people run to each other, I like the kissing and the cr...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

I could not believe in a God that would challenge faith like this.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Every moment before this one depends on this one.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

She was like a drowning person, flailing, reaching for anything that might save her. Her life was an...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

That is what death is like. It doesn't matter what uniforms the soldiers are wearing. It doesn't mat...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

There are two kinds of sculptures. There's the kind that subtracts: Michelangelo starts with a b...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

It was not the feeling of completeness I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

If there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it walls, and we will f...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Or perhaps a widow found him and took him in: brought him an easy chair, changed his sweater every m...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

When I looked at you, my life made sense. Even the bad things made sense. They were necessary to mak...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

This is love, she thought, isn’t it? When you notice someone’s absence and hate that absence mor...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

He knew that I love you also means I love you in a way that no one loves you, or has loved you, or w...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

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

I thought about all of the things that everyone ever says to each other, and how everyone is going t...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

It's true, I am afraid of dying. I am afraid of the world moving forward without me, of my absence g...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Just because youre an atheist, that doesnt mean you wouldnt love for things to have reasons fo...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

She wanted more, more slang, more figures of speech, the bee's knees, the cats pajamas, horse of a d...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

(You do not have to be shamed in my closeness. Family are the people who must never make you feel as...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

He spent the next weeks blocking scenes of the bureaucrat fucking his wife. On the floor with cookin...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

We need a better way to talk about eating animals. We need a way that brings meat to the center of p...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Not responding is a response--we are equally responsible for what we don't do. In the case of animal...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

...people with nothing to declare carry the most.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

I am not a bad person," he said. "I am good person who has lived un a bad time.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Just because you’re an atheist, that doesn’t mean you wouldn’t love for things to have reasons...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

My dream went all the way back to the beginning. The rain rose into the clouds, and the animals desc...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

If we are not given the option to live without violence, we are given the choice to center our meals...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Just how destructive does a culinary preference have to be before we decide to eat something else? I...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Not responding is a response - we are equally responsible for what we don't do.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

We are being very nomadic with the truth, yes?
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

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

I tried the key in all the doors, even though he said he didn't recognize it. It's not that I didn't...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

I shook my tambourine the whole time, because it helped me remember that even though I was going thr...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

I wanted to build walls around him, I wanted to separate inside from outside, I wanted to give him a...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

There are only so many times that you can utter ‘It does not hurt’ before it begins to hurt even...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

But I do not do these things because we are family. I do them because they are common decencies. Tha...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

If we were to one day encounter a form of life more powerful and intelligent than our own, and it re...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Only a few months into our marriage, we started marking off areas in the apartment as "Nothing Place...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

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

Every widow wakes one morning, perhaps after years of pure and unwavering grieving, to realize she s...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

I went to a tattoo parlor and had YES written onto the palm of my left hand, and NO onto my right pa...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

People care about animals. I believe that. They just don’t want to know or to pay. A fourth of all...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

If limousines were extremely long, they wouldn't need drivers. You could just get in the back seat, ...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Are you an optimist or a pessimist?"
"I can't remember. Which?"
"Do you know what those ...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

I don't think that there are any limits to how excellent we could make life seem.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

He looked so much like me, I could tell that he saw it, too, we shared the smile of recognizing ours...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

And so it was when anyone tried to speak: their minds would become tangled in remembrance. Words bec...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Memories are small prayers to God, if we believed in that sort of thing.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

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

Parents are always more knowledgeable than their children, and children are always smarter than thei...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

The end of the world has come often, and continues to come.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

If we communicated with something like music, we would never be misunderstood, because there is noth...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Everything is to protect you. I exist in case you need to be protected.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

She has become an expert at confusing what is with what was with what should be...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

The only way to overcome sadness is to consume it.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

SADNESS OF THE INTELLECT: Sadness of being misunderstood [sic]; Humor sadness; Sadness...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder.
Everything moved me. A do...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

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

You are the only one who has understood even a whisper of me, and I will tell you that I am the only...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

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

The bruises go away, and so does how you hate, and so does the feeling that everything you receive f...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

The only thing more painful than being an active forgetter is to be an inert rememberer.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convinc...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

I am always sad, I think. Perhaps this signifies that I am not sad at all, because sadness is someth...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

The more you love someone, he came to think, the harder it is to tell them. It surpris...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

This is love, she thought, isn't it? When you notice someone's absence and hate that absence more th...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

One day you will do things for me that you hate. That is what it means to be family.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

I often think about how my sons will come to know about September 11th. Something overheard? A newsp...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Mom told me, “It probably gets pretty lonely to be Grandma, don’t you think?” I told her, “I...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

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

I said, I want to tell you something.
She said, you can tell me tomorrow.
I had never told...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Words never mean what we want them to mean.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

I knew that our time together was almost over, I asked her if she liked sports, she asked me if I li...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

We slept in the same bed.
There was never a right time to say it.
It was always unnecessar...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

In the end, everyone loses everyone. There was no invention to get around that, and so I felt, that ...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

It's the tragedy of loving, you can't love anything more than something you miss.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Anyone who believes that a second is faster than a decade did not live life.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Touching him was always so important to me. It was something I lived for. I never could explain why....
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Being reliable is something. Being good.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

You can't love anything more than something you miss.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

You only get to keep what you refuse to let go of.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

I'm less worried about accomplishment - as younger people always can't help but be - and mor...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

From space, astronauts can see people making love as a tiny speck of light. Not light, exactly, but ...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Anyway.
I’m not allowed to watch TV, although I am allowed to rent documentaries that are app...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

I have made my own choice, which is vegetarianism, but it's not the choice I'm imposing on a...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

The kind of funny irony is that a lot of people talk about ethical meat eating as if it's a way ...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

It's rarely talked about, but hunting for sport is just about as vile as we humans get.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

I read the first chapter of A Brief History of Time when Dad was still alive, and I got incredibly h...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

It has shown me that everything is illuminated in the light of the past. It is always along the side...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

My children not only inspired me to reconsider what kind of eating animal I would be, but also shame...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

...and when is enough proof enough?
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

E allora quanta sofferenza è accettabile? È questa la base di tutto, ed è questo che ognuno di no...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

My greatest fear is feeling like a professional novelist. Somebody who creates characters, who sits ...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Jacob wrestled with God for the blessing. He wrestled with Esau for the blessing. He wrestled with I...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

God loves the plagiarist. And so it is written, 'God created humankind in His image, in the image of...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

...This is a kiss. It is what happens when lips are puckered and pressed against something, sometime...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

It made me start to wonder if there were other people so lonely so close. I thought about “Eleanor...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

I wanted to cry but I didn't, I probably should have cried, I should have drowned us there in the ro...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

What's so horrible about being dead forever, and not feeling anything, and not even dreaming? What's...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Does it break my heart, of course, every moment of every day, into more pieces than my heart was mad...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

I went to my grandmother, your great-great-grandmother, and asked her to write a letter. She was my ...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Writing's funny, it's like walking down a hall in the dark looking for the light switch, and suddenl...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Two friends are ordering lunch. One says, 'I'm in the mood for a burger,' and orders it. The other s...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

A map such as that one is worth many hundreds, and as luck will have it, thousands of dollars. But m...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

At the end of my dream, Eve put the apple back on the branch. The tree went back into the ground. It...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

The letter was destroyed, but its final paragraph is inside of me. She wrote, I wish I could be a gi...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

This is the sixty-nine,” I told him,
presenting the magazine in front of him. I put my finger...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Puoi levarti anche le calze?" Gli chiedeva lei. "E i calzoni?"
"E tu ti puoi levare i tuoi?" JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

THE PROBLEM OF GOOD: WHY UNCONDITIONALLY GOOD THINGS HAPPEN TO UNCONDITIONALLY BAD PEOPLE
(SEE ...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

I will walk without noise and I will open the door in darkness and I will
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

He awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as sim...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Brod’s life was a slow realization that the world was not for her, and that for whatever reason, s...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

I have been waiting for you for so long.”
I pointed to the car. “We are searching for Trach...
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Our love was the affliction for which only our love was the cure.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Jonathan Safran Foer

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