Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes - Page 2

How many times, in those first weeks, did he enter the room and stand by the door, unable to speak? How many times did she ask, "Do you need anything?"And he would say, "No."And she would say "Are you sure?"And he would say, "Yes," but think, Ask again.And she would say, "I know," but think, Come to me.And he would say , "Ask again."And she would say, "Come to me."And saying nothing, he would.There they would be, side by side, her hand on his thigh, his head resting on her chest. If they had been teenagers, it would have looked like the beginning of love, but they'd been married for twenty years, and it was the exhumation of love.

...is ignorance bliss, I don't know, but it's so painful to think, and tell me, what did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever bring me? I think and think and think, I've thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.

If we were to one day encounter a form of life more powerful and intelligent than our own, and it regarded us as we regard fish, what would be our argument against being eaten?

So She had to satisfy herself with the idea of love-loving the loving of things whose existence she didn't care at all about. Love itself became the object of her love. She loved herself in love, she loved loving love, as love loves loving, and was able, in that way, to reconcile herself with a world that fell so short of what she would have hoped for.

So many people enter and leave your life! Hundreds of thousands of people! You have to keep the door open so they can come in! But it also means you have to let them go!

Grandfather informs me that is not possible.

Food for her is not food, it is terror, dignity, gratitude, vengeance, joyfulness, humiliation, religion, history, and, of course, love. As if the fruit she always offered us were picked from the destroyed brances of out family tree.

I feel too much. That's what's going on.' 'Do you think one can feel too much? Or just feel in the wrong ways?' 'My insides don't match up with my outsides.' 'Do anyone's insides and outsides match up?' 'I don't know. I'm only me.' 'Maybe that's what a person's personality is: the difference between the inside and outside.' 'But it's worse for me.' 'I wonder if everyone thinks it's worse for him.' 'Probably. But it really is worse for me.

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.

AND IF WE ARE TO STRIVE FOR A BETTER FUTURE, MUSTN'T WE BE FAMILIAR AND RECONCILED WITH OUR PAST?

Did she feel pity for me, did she want me to suffer?The next morning she led me to the coat closet, which faces the living room, she went in with me, we were in there all day, although she knew he wouldn’t come until the afternoon, it was too small, we needed more space between us, we needed Nothing Places, she said “This is what it’s felt like, except you weren’t here.” We looked at each other in silence for hours.

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

I went to my grandmother, your great-great-grandmother, and asked her to write a letter. She was my mother's mother. Your father's mother's mother's mother. I hardly knew her. I didn't have any interest in knowing her. I have no need for the past, I thought, like a child. I did not consider that the past might have a need for me.What kind of letter? my grandmother asked.I told her to write whatever she wanted to write.You want a letter from me? she asked.I told her yes.Oh, God bless you, she said.The letter she gave me was sixty-seven pages long. It was the story of her life. She made my request into her own. Listen to me.

...people with nothing to declare carry the most.

Let's go to bed. Those four words differentiate a marriage from every other kind of relationship. We aren't going to find a way to agree, but let's go to bed. Not because we want to, but because we have to. We hate each other right now, but let's go to bed. It's the only one we have. Let's go to our sides, but the sides of the same bed. Let's retreat into ourselves, but together. How many conversations had ended with those four words? How many fights?

I' was the last word I was able to speak aloud, which is a terrible thing, but there it is, I would walk around the neighborhood saying, 'I I I I.' 'You want a cup of coffee, Thomas?''I.' 'And maybe something sweet?''I.' 'How about this weather?''I.' 'You look upset. Is anything wrong?' I wanted to say, 'Of course,' I wanted to ask, 'Is anything right?' I wanted to pull the thread, unravel the scarf of my silence and start again from the beginning, but instead I said 'I.' I know I'm not alone in this disease, you hear the old people in the street and some of them are moaning, 'Ay yay yay,' but some of them are clinging to their last word, 'I,' they're saying, because they're desperate, it's not a complaint, it's a prayer, and then I lost 'I' and my silence was complete.

Fuck You!' [Oskar said] 'Exuse me!' [His mom said] 'Sorry. I mean, screw you.' 'You need a time-out!' 'I need a mausoleum!

Parents are always more knowledgeable than their children, and children are always smarter than their parents.

The persistence of the story of animal consent into the contemporary era tells of a human appreciation of the stakes, and a desire to do the right thing.

she also liked to remember that there could be no such thing as an intentional imperfection. People are always mistaking something that looks good for something that feels good.

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?

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

Mother is a humble woman. Very, very humble. She toils at a small café one hour distance from our home. She presents food and drink to customers there, and says to me, "I mount the autobus for an hour to work all day doing things I hate. You want to know why? It is for you, Alexi-stop-spleening-me! One day you will do things for me that you hate. That is what it means to be a family." What she does not clutch is that I already do things for her that I hate. I listen to her when she talks to me. I resist complaining about my pygmy allowance. And did I mention that I do not spleen her nearly so much as I desire to? But I do not do these things because we are a family. I do them because they are common decencies. That is an idiom that the hero taught me. I do them because I am not a big fucking asshole. That is another idiom that the hero taught me.

Deep down, the young are lonelier than the old.' I read that in a book somewhere and it's stuck in my head. Maybe it's true. Maybe it's not true. More likely, the young and the old are lonely in different ways, in their own ways...

Thomas! What are you doing!" and I gestured, "I thought this was Nothing," covering myself with one of my daybooks ,and she said, "It's Something!

Ironically, the utterly unselective omnivore -- "I'm easy; I'll eat anything" -- can appear more socially sensitive than the individual who tries to eat in a way that is good for society.

There are only so many times that you can utter ‘It does not hurt’ before it begins to hurt even more than the hurt. You become enlightened of the feeling of feeling hurt, which is worse, I am certain, than the existent hurt.

Brod's life was a slow realization that the world was not for her, and that for whatever reason, she would never be happy and honest at the same time. She felt as if she were brimming, always producing and hoarding more love inside her. But there was no release...So she had to satisfy herself with the idea of love--loving the loving of things whose existence she didn't care at all about. Love itself became the object of her love. She loved herself in love, she loved loving love, as love loves loving, and was able, in that way, to reconcile herself with a world that fell so short of what she would have hoped for. It was not the world that was the great and saving lie, but her willingness to make it beautiful and fair, to live a once-removed life, in a world once-removed from the one in which everyone else seemed to exist.

Because sometimes people who seem goodend up being not as good as you might have hoped.

When we lift our forks, we hang our hats somewhere. We set ourselves in one relationship or another to farmed animals, farm-workers, national economies, and global markets. Not making a decision--eating 'like everyone else'--is to make the easiest decision, a decision that is increasingly problematic.

He chose illness, because he knew of no other way to be seen. Not even by those looking at him.

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

One can build a perfect home, but not live in it.

Today, it isn't unusual for meat to travel almost halfway around the globe to reach your supermarket. The average distance our meat travels hovers arounf fifteen hundred miles.

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.

I know a lot about birds and bees, but I don't know very much about the birds and the bees. Everything I do know I had to teach myself on the Internet, because I don't have anyone to ask. For example, I know that you give someone a blowjob by putting your penis in their mouth.

You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.

I realized that your mother couldn't see the emptiness, she couldn't see anything...All of the words I'd written to her over all of those years, had I never said anything to hear at all?

She was a genius of sadness, immersing herself in it, separating its numerous strands, appreciating its subtle nuances. She was a prism through which sadness could be divided into its infinite spectrum.

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

If there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it walls, and we will furnish it with soft, red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweller's felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does.

In the struggle between yourself and the world, side with the world

I am always sad, I think. Perhaps this signifies that I am not sad at all, because sadness is something lower than your normal disposition, and I am always the same thing. Perhaps I am the only person in the world, then, who never becomes sad. Perhaps I am lucky.

He promised us that everything would be OK. I was a child, but I knew that everything would not be OK. That did not make my father a liar. It made him my father.

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

She was a prism through which sadness could be divided into its infinite spectrum.

...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.

She said, "Do you have more things that you need, or more that you don't need?" I said, "It depends on what it means to need.

It made me start to wonder if there were other people so lonely so close. I thought about “Eleanor Rigby.” It’s true, where do they all come from? And where do they all belong?

I want an infinitely blank book and the rest of time.

He promised us that everything would be okay. I was a child, but I knew that everything would not be okay. That did not make my father a liar. It made him my father.

Scientific studies and government records suggest that virtually all (upwards of 95 percent of) chickens become infected with E. coli (an indicator of fecal contamination) and between 39 and 75 percent of chickens in retail stores are still infected. Around 8 percent of birds become infected with salmonella (down from several years ago, when at least one in four birds was infected, which still occurs on some farms). Seventy to 90 percent are infected with another potentially deadly pathogen, campylobacter. Chlorine baths are commonly used to remove slime, odor, and bacteria.Of course, consumers might notice that their chickens don't taste quite right - how good could a drug-stuffed, disease-ridden, shit-contaminated animal possibly taste? - but the birds will be injected (or otherwise pumped up) with "broths" and salty solutions to give them what we have come to think of as the chicken look, smell, and taste. (A recent study by Consumer Reports found that chicken and turkey products, many labeled as natural, "ballooned with 10 to 30 percent of their weight as broth, flavoring, or water.

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.

I hated the gnawing longing that accompanied having everything.

Before you rush off trying to see everything you can, educate yourself.

My dream went all the way back to the beginning. The rain rose into the clouds, and the animals descended the ramp.

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

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.

We know, at least, that this decision (ending factory farming) will help prevent deforestation, curb global warming, reduce pollution, save oil reserves, lessen the burden on rural America, decrease human rights abuses, improve publish health, and help eliminate the most systematic animal abuse in history.

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