Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

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“I wanted to touch him, to tell him that even if everyone left everyone, I would never leave him, he talked and talked, his words fell through him, trying to find the floor to his sadness.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The end of suffering does not justify the suffering, and so there is no end to suffering.”

“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.”

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

“I thought, it's a shame that we have to live, but it's a tragedy that we get to live only one life, because if I'd had two lives, I would have spent one of them with her.”

“It broke my heart into more pieces than my heart was made of, why can't people say what they mean at the time?”

“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 tried the key in all the doors, even though he said he didn't recognize it. It's not that I didn't trust him, becuase I did. It's that at the end of my search I wanted to be able to say: I don't know how I could have tried harder.”

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

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

“Words never mean what we want them to mean.”

“It was one of the best days of my life, a day during which I lived my life and didn't think about my life at all.”

“If nothing matters, there's nothing to save.”

“I spent my life learning to feel less.
Every day I felt less.
Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?
You can not protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.”

“… because he had been waiting for someone to come back to him, so every time someone knocked on the door, he couldn't stop himself from hoping it might be that person, even though he knew he shouldn't hope.”

“Everything is the way it is because everything was the way it was. Sometimes I feel ensnared in this, as if no matter what I do, what will come has already been fixed.”

“Even if I don't like what I am, I know what I am. My children like what they are, but they don't know what they are. So tell me which is worse.”

“We were quiet on the car ride home. I turned on the radio and found a station playing "Hey Jude." It was true, I didn't want to make it bad. I wanted to take the sad song and make it better. It's just that I didn't know how.”

“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?”

“Whether we change our lives or do nothing, we have responded. To do nothing is to do something.”

“I have so much to say to you. I want to begin at the beginning, because that is what you deserve. I want to tell you everything, without leaving out a single detail. But where is the beginning? And what is everything?”

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

“Do you have any coffee?'…'It stunts my growth, and I'm afraid of death.”

“She is deranged, but so so playful.”

“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.”

“Try to live so that you can always tell the truth.”

“I want an infinitely blank book and the rest of time…
… why didn't I learn to treat everything like it was the last time, my greatest regret is how much I believed in the future.”

“… there are only some many times you can utter "It does not hurt" before it begins to hurt even more than the hurt.”

“[She] always knew he was a fiction but believed in him anyway.”

“I was more alone than if I had been alone.”

“She said, 'Believe it or not, I used to be idealistic.' I asked her what 'idealistic' meant. 'It means you live by what you think is right.' 'You don't do that anymore?' 'There are questions I don't ask anymore.”

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

“Not responding is a response--we are equally responsible for what we don't do. In the case of animal slaughter, to throw your hands in the air is to wrap your fingers around a knife handle.”

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

“He knew that I love you also means I love you in a way that no one loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that I love no one else, and never have loved anyone else, and never will love anyone else.”

“The images of his infinite pasts and infinite futures washed over him as he waited, paralyzed, in the present.”

“Do you eat chicken because you are familiar with the scientific literature on them and have decided that their suffering doesn't matter, or do you do it because it tastes good?”

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

“I will describe my eyes and then begin the story. My eyes are blue and resplendent. Now I will begin the story.”

“I didn't understand why I needed help, because it seemed to me that youwear heavy boots when your dad dies, and if youwearing heavy boots, you need help.”

“Literature was the only religion her father practiced, when a book fell on the floor he kissed it, when he was done with a book he tried to give it away to someone who would love it.”

“… only someone who'd never been an animal would put up a sign saying not to feed them….”

“Grandfather informs me that is not possible.”

“Since the world has changed so much, the same values don't lead to the same choices anymore.”

“Once you hear something, you can never return to the time before you heard it.”

“Because sometimes people who seem good
end up being not as good as you might have hoped.”

“What is being awake if not interpreting our dreams, or dreaming if not interpreting our wake?”