Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

If nothing matters, there's nothing to save.

Humans are the only animal that blushes, laughs, has religion, wages war, and kisses with lips. So in a way, the more you kiss with lips, the more human you are. And the more you wage war.

But I still couldn't figure out what it all meant. The more I found out, the less I understood.

Why didn't he say goodbye? I gave myself a bruise. Why didn't he say 'I love you'?

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.

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?

As long as I am thinking, I am alive.

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

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?

Part of living your life is an awareness of the opportunities that can be missed and an awareness that time moves in one direction.

Writers now are putting total faith in designers at Apple and Amazon. It's almost like a race-car driver having no input into how cars are designed.

Being with him made my brain quiet. I didn't have to invent a thing.

I never confused what I had with what I was.

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

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.

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?

Each day has been chained to the previous one. But the weeks have wings. Anyone who believes that a second is faster than a decade did not live my life.

I got incredibly heavy boots about how relatively insignificant life is, and how, compared to the universe and compared to time, it didn’t even matter if I existed at all.

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

Fiction works when it makes a reader feel something strongly.

It’s hard to say goodbye to the place you’ve lived. It can be as hard as saying goodbye to a person.

Only humans can cry tears.

I didn't feel empty. I wished I'd felt empty. ... I wanted to be empty like an overturned pitcher. But I was full like a stone.

The only thing worse than being sad is for others to know you are sad.

If I’d been someone else in a different world I’d've done something different, but I was myself and the world was the world, so I was silent.

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.

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

...and when is enough proof enough?

I'm less worried about accomplishment - as younger people always can't help but be - and more concerned with spending my time well, spending time with my family, and reading, learning things.

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

Weeks passed like boats waiting to sail into the starless dawn, we were full of aimless endless darkness.

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

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

Then I have some bad news for you, because humans are going to destroy each other as soon as it becomes easy enough to, which will be very soon.

Every moment before this one depends on this one.

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

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’s much easier to be cruel than one might think.

Grandfather informs me that is not possible.

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?

I wanted to cry but I didn't, I probably should have cried, I should have drowned us there in the room ending our suffering.

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?

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

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

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

But I knew the truth and that's why I was so sad. Every moment before this one depends on this one. Everything in the history of the world can be proven wrong in one moment.

She extended a hand that I didn't know how to take, so I broke its fingers with my silence.

The philosopher Elaine Scarry has observed that "beauty always takes place in the particular." Cruelty, on the other hand, prefers abstraction.

Isn't it so weird how the number of dead people is increasing even though the Earth stays the same size, so that one day there isn't going to be room to bury anyone anymore?

...accepting the compromise of the way we have been, the way we are, and the way we will likely be...may we live together in unwavering love and good health, amen.