Top 611 Quotes & Sayings by Jonathan Safran Foer - Page 6

If god exists, he is not to be believed in.

Murdering someone would surely prove that you are capable of killing, but it wouldn't be the most reasonable way to understand why you shouldn't do it.

I would have done anything for him. Maybe that was my sickness. We made love in nothing places and turned the lights off. It felt like crying. We could not look at each other. It always had to be from behind. Like that first time. And I knew he wasn't thinking of me. He squeezed my sides so hard, and pushed so hard. Like he was trying to push me through to somewhere else. Why does anyone ever make love?

What if I never stop inventing?

Everyone is always in need of something that another person can give, be it undivided attention, a kind word or deep empathy. There is no better use of a life than to be attentive to such needs.

I hope you never think about anything as much as I think about you.

SADNESSES OF THE INTELLECT: Sadness of being misunderstood [sic]; Humor sadness; Sadness of love wit[hou]t release; Sadne[ss of be]ing smart; Sadness of not knowing enough words to [express what you mean]; Sadness of having options; Sadness of wanting sadness; Sadness of confusion; Sadness of domes[tic]ated birds; Sadness of fini[shi]ng a book; Sadness of remembering; Sadness of forgetting; Anxiety sadness.

Language is never fully trustworthy, but when it comes to eating animals, words are as often used to misdirect and camouflage as they are to communicate. Some words, like veal, help us forget what we are actually talking about. Some, like free-range, can mislead those whose consciences seek clarification. Some, like happy, mean the opposite of what they would seem. And some, like natural, mean next to nothing.

I wanted to tell her everything, maybe if I'd been able to, we could have lived differently, maybe I'd be there with you now instead of here. Maybe... if I'd said, 'I'm so afraid of losing something I love that I refuse to love anything,' maybe that would have made the impossible possible. Maybe, but I couldn't do it, I had buried too much too deeply inside me. And here I am, instead of there.

I try not to remember the life that I didn’t want to lose but lost and have to remember

In the end, everyone loses everyone. There was no invention to get around that.

Life is scarier than death.

It’s a rule that we never listen to sad music, we made that rule early on, songs are as sad as the listener, we hardly ever listen to music.

I love the idea of books being more than books, or being, rather, something other than books.

But come. No explaining or mending. Be beside me somewhere.

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

Animal agriculture makes a 40% greater contribution to global warming than all transportation in the world combined; it is the number one cause of climate change.

He couldn't bear to live, but he couldn't bear to die. He couldn't bear the thought of he making love to someone else, but neither could he bear the absence of the thought. And as for the note, he couldn't bear to keep it, but he couldn't bear to destroy it either.

How would you judge an artist who mutilated animals in a gallery because it was visually arresting? How riveting would the sound of a tortured animal need to be to make you want to hear it that badly? Try to imagine any end other than taste for which it would be justifiable to do what we do to farmed animals.

Factory farming, of course, does not cause all the world's problems, but is is remarkable just how many of them intersect there.

I got tired, I told him. Not worn out, but worn through. Like one of those wives who wakes up one morning and says I can't bake any more bread.

August has passed, and yet summer continues by force to grow days. They sprout secretly between the chapters of the year, covertly included between its pages.

Why is taste, the crudest of our senses, exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other senses?

In truth I was manufacturing a brick wall of shits.

We are not long-term beings. Not heroes of romances in many volumes. For one gesture, for one word alone, we shall make the effort. We openly admit: our creations will be temporary. We shall have this as our aim: a gesture.

Brod discovered 613 sadnesses, each perfectly unique, each a singular emotion, no more similar to any other sadness than to anger, ecstasy, guilt, or frustration. Mirror Sadness. Sadness of Domesticated Birds. Sadness of Being Sad in front of One's Parent. Humor Sadness. Sadness of Love Without Release.

The factory farm has succeeded by divorcing people from their food, eliminating farmers, and ruling agriculture by corporate fiat.

Find a printer paper and imagine a full-grown bird shaped something like a football with legs standing on it. Imagine 33,000 of these rectangles in a grid. (Broilers are never in cages, and never on multiple levels.) Now enclose the grid with windowless walls and put a ceiling on top. Run in automated (drug-laced) feed, water, heating, and ventilation systems. This is a farm.

...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.

To feel alone is to be alone.

However much we obfuscate or ignore it, we know that the factory farm is inhumane in the deepest sense of the word. And we know that there is something that matters in a deep way about the lives we create for the living beings most within our power. Our response to the factory farm is ultimately a test of how we respond to the powerless, to the most distant, to the voiceless--it is a test of how we act when no one is forcing us to act one way or another.

i couldn't speak the language of his feelings

In the end, everyone loses everyone.

I asked her, "Are you an optimist or a pessimist?" She looked at her watch and said, "I'm optimistic." "Then I have some bad news for you, because humans are going to destroy each others as soon as it becomes easy enough to, which will be very soon." "Why do beautiful songs make you sad?" "Because they aren't true." "Never?" "Nothing is beautiful and true." She smiled, but in a way that wasn't just happy, and said, "You sound just like Dad.

We looked at each other until it felt like everything would burst into flames

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

If it had and answer, it wouldn't really be love, would it?

I started carrying blank books like this one around, which I would fill with all the things I couldn't say.

Yesterday I wanted to turn inside out.

That’s all anyone wants from anyone else, not love itself but the knowledge that love is there.

I wanted so much to have a life. Even just once, even for a second.

She wanted nothing more than someone to miss, to touch, with whom to speak like a child, with whom to be a child.

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 were we spending so much time doing if not getting to know each other?

Maybe I'll try to be more patient with morons.

How beautiful is forgetting! What relief it would be for the world to lose some of its contents.

Our love was the affliction for which only our love was the cure.

She felt as if she were brimming, always producing and hoarding more love inside her. But there was no release.

You have to do something bad to do something good.

Nothing is beautiful and true.

I would have done anything for him. Maybe that was my sickness.

I kept thinking how they were all names of dead people, and how names are basically the only thing dead people keep.

Things were happening around us, but nothing was happening between us.

Sometimes one simply wants to disappear.

It shouldn't be the consumer's responsibility to figure out what's cruel and what's kind, what's environmentally destructive and what's sustainable. Cruel and destructive food products should be illegal. We don't need the option of buying children's toys made with lead paint, or aerosols with chlorofluorocarbons, or medicines with unlabeled side effects. And we don't need the option of buying factory-farmed animals.

She saw through the shell of me into the center of me

The end of suffering does not justify the suffering, what a mess I am, I thought, what a fool, how foolish and narrow, how worthless, how pinched and pathetic, how helpless.

I believed him. I was not stupid. I was his wife.

Nine out of ten significant people have to do with money or war!

It was terrible. All of the things we couldn't share. The room was filled with conversations we weren't having.