Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

page 3

“I looked at everyone and wondered where they came from, and who they missed, and what they were sorry for.”

“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.”

“There is nothing wrong with compromising, even if you are compromising almost everything.”

“Let love write on you for awhile.”

“He ran the back of his hand up her cheek, with the pretense of wiping away sweat.”

“It was the first time I had ever made love. I wondered if he knew that. It felt like crying. I wondered, Why does anyone ever make love?”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“… sometimes you have to put your fears in order…”

“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 was getting hard to keep all the things I didn't know inside me.”

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

“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.”

“I'd lost count of the disappointments.”

“She wrote, I wish I could be a girl again, with a chance to live my life again. I have suffered so much more than I needed to. And the joys I have felt have not always been joyous. I could have lived differently.”

“If it weren't my life, I wouldn't have believed it.”

“Something having been done just about everywhere just about always is no kind of justification for doing it now.”

“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.”

“I said, 'I need to know how he died.'
He flipped back and pointed at, 'Why?'
So I can stop inventing how he died. I'm always inventing.”

“Everything that's born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they're all on fire, and we're all trapped.”

“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?”

“It's always possible to wake someone from sleep, but no amount of noise will wake someone who is pretending to be asleep.”

“I put my hand on the doorknob because I thought maybe her hand was on the doorknob on the other side.”

“When you look up 'hilarious' in the dictionary, there's a picture of you.”

“Sadness of love without release.”

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

“I read the first chapter ofwhen Dad was still alive, and 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.”

“I went to the guest room and pretended to write. I hit the space bar again and again and again. My life story was spaces.”

“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.”

“I know you look both ways before you cross the street, but I want you to look both ways a second time, because I told you to.”

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

“Anyone who believes that a second is faster than a decade did not live life.”

“The paper, the stapler, the staples, the tape. It makes me sick. Physical things. Forty years of loving someone becomes staples and tape.”

“… the meaning of my thoughts started to float away from me, like leaves that fall from a tree into a river, I was the tree, the world was the river.”

“To feel alone is to be alone.”

“I love sushi, I love fried chicken, I love steak. But there is a limit to my love”

“I am sure people tell you this constantly but if you looked up 'incredibly beautiful' in the dictionary there would be a picture of you.”

“There were things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him, so I buried them, and let them hurt me.”

“My insides don't match up with my outsides. -Do anyone's inside 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 the outside.”

“We could imagine all sorts of universes unlike this one, but this is the one that happened.”

“Isn't it strange how upset people get about a few dozen baseball players taking growth hormones, when we're doing what were doing to our food animals and feeding them to our children?”

“Highs and lows make you feel that things matter, but they're nothing." "So what's something?" "Being reliable is something. Being good.”

“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.”

“Choosing leaf or flesh, factory farm or family farm, does not in itself change the world, but teaching ourselves, our children, our local communities, and our nation to choose conscience over ease can.”

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

“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.”