Top 611 Quotes & Sayings by Jonathan Safran Foer - Page 4

My point is that there are a lot of forces, like the media and the general political rhetoric tells us we should have more. That we should do better than our parents and have a bigger house or a better car.

We burned with love for ourselves, all of us, starters of the fire we suffered- our love was the affliction for which only our love was the cure.

Ninety-nine percent of all land animals eaten or used to produce milk and eggs in the United States are factory farmed. So although there are important exceptions, to speak about eating animals today is to speak about factory farming.

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

It's so hard to express yourself.' I understand this.' I want to express myself.' The same is true for me.' I'm looking for my voice.' It's in your mouth.' I want to do something I'm not ashamed of.' Something you are proud of, yes?' Not even. I just don't want to be ashamed.

Succotash my Balzac, dipshiitake.

Also, I designed a pretty fascinating bracelet, where you put a rubber band around your favorite book of poems for a year, and then you take it off and wear it.

Tomorrow was over the horizon, and would take an entire day to reach.

I was more alone than if I had been alone.

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

The animals are those things that God likes but doesn't love.

What is suffering? I'm not sure what it is, but I know that suffering is the name we give to the origin of all the sighs, screams, and groans — small and large, crude and multifaceted — that concern us. The word defines our gaze even more than what we are looking at.

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

I watched the sheets breathe when she breathed, like how Dad used to say that trees inhale when people exhale, because I was too young to understand the truth about biological processes.

....Worthy would-be worlds of words, whorls of working wonder.

In my family, Father is the world champion at ending conversations.

Memory was supposed to fill the time, but it made time a hole to be filled. Each second was two hundred yards, to be walked, crawled. You couldn't see the next hour, it was so far in the distance. Tomorrow was over the horizon, and would take an entire day to reach.

What does it remember like?

Every night before putting her to sleep, Yankel counts her ribs, as if one might have disappeared in the course of the day and become the seed and soil for some new companion to steal her away from him.

Food serves two parallel purposes: it nourishes and it helps you remember. Eating and storytelling are inseparable-the saltwater is also tears; the honey not only tastes sweet, but makes us think of sweetness; the matzo is the bread of our affliction.

This is love, she thought, isn't it? When you notice someone's absence and hate that absence more than anything? More, even, than you love his presence?

She brushed her eyelashes against his chest.

Sometimes you have to put your fears in order.

This brings me back to the image of Kafka standing before a fish in the Berlin aquarium, a fish on which his gaze fell in a newly found peace after he decided not to eat animals. Kafka recognized that fish as a member of his invisible family- not as his equal, of course, but as another being that was his concern.

[S]o if the device of the person in the ambulance detected the device of the person he loved the most, or the person who loved him the most, and the person in the ambulance was really badly hurt, and might even die, the ambulance could flash GOODBYE! I LOVE YOU! GOODBYE! I LOVE YOU!

I thought for a minute, and then I got heavy, heavy boots.

We talked about nothing in particular, but it felt like we were talking about the most important things.

I wasn’t having second thoughts, but I was having thoughts.

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

When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own.

But I dig Negroes. I dig them all the way.

Everything else happened - why not the things that could have?

It can be challenge enough to have to eat with myself.

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

I shook my tambourine the whole time, because it helped me remember that even though I was going through different neighborhoods, I was still me.

I was of the opinion that the past is past, and like all that is not now it should remain buried along the side of our memories.

She had fallen in love so many times that she began to suspect she was not falling in love at all, but doing something much more ordinary.

I think it's very pretty. Can it be pretty if no one thinks it's pretty? I think it's pretty. If you're the only one? That's pretty pretty. And what about the boys? Don't you want them to think you're pretty? I wouldn't want a boy to think I was pretty unless he was the kind of boy who thought I was pretty.

I'm a vegetarian. You're a what? I don't eat meat. How can you not eat meat? I just don't. He says he does not eat meat. What? No meat? No meat. Steak? No... Chickens! No... And what about the sausage? No, no sausage, no meat! He says he does not eat any meat. Not even sausage? I know! What is wrong with him? What is wrong with you? Nothing, I just don't eat meat!

We aren’t exactly emptying the oceans; it’s more like clear-cutting a forest with thousands of species to create massive fields with one type of soybean.

I felt, that night, on that stage, under that skull, incredibly close to everything in the universe, but also extremely alone. I wondered, for the first time in my life, if life was worth all the work it took to live. What exactly made it worth it? What's so horrible about being dead forever, and not feeling anything, and not even dreaming? What's so great about feeling and dreaming?

One hundred years of joy can be erased in one second

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

It will never be the case that people won't eat meat. I think it could conceivably be the case one day that people eat very small amounts of it. That it's a special thing, rather than reach for it because it's cheap or reach for it because it's convenient, that it becomes something festive or something celebratory, once a week, and that could actually be achieved on small farms if we really changed our habits.

If we communicated with something like music, we would never be misunderstood, because there is nothing in music to understand...... But until we find this new way of speaking, until we can find a nonapproximate vocabulary, nonsense words are the best thing we've got. Ifactifice is one such word.

Sadness of not knowing enough words to [express what you mean].

No matter how much I feel, I’m not going to let it out. If I have to cry, I’m gonna cry on the inside. If I have to bleed, I’ll bruise. If my heart starts going crazy, I’m not gonna tell everyone in the world about it. It doesn’t help anything. It just makes everyone’s life worse.

Silently the animal catches our glance. The animal looks at us, and whether we look away (from the animal, our plate, our concern, ourselves) or not, we are exposed. Whether we change our lives or do nothing, we have responded. To do nothing is to do something

I can't even say 'hair pie,'' I told him, 'unless I'm talking about an actual pie made out of rabbits.

And she would say, "Today you believe in God?" And he would say, "Today I believe in love".

I wish my days could be washed away like the chalk lines of my days.

Please be truthful, but also please be benevolent, please.

Sometimes I imagined stitching all of our little touches together. How many hundreds of thousands of fingers brushing against each other does it take to make love? Why does anyone ever make love?

You can call your turkey organic and torture it daily.

...he enclosed pieces of string that he used to measure out his body--his head, thigh, forearm, finger, neck, everything. He wanted me to sleep with them under my pillow. He said that when he came back, we would remeasure his body against the string as proof that he hadn't changed.

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

A few weeks after the worst day, I started writing lots of letters. I don't know why, but it was one of the only things that made my boots lighter.

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

I woke up once in the middle of the night, and Buckminster's paws were on my eyelids. He must have been feeling my nightmares.

Oh,' she said. 'I have never seen a Jew before. Can I see his horns?