Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

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“I’d rather somebody hate what I do than be indifferent to it.”

“We spent our lives making livings.”

“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.”

“I thought for a minute, and then I got heavy, heavy boots.”

“… Sadness of not knowing enough words to [express what you mean]…”

“We shared the smile of recognizing ourselves in each other, how many imposters do I have? Do we all make the same mistakes, or has one of us gotten it right, or even just a bit less wrong, am I the imposter?”

“She was with me. She did all of those things and so many more, things I would never tell anyone, and she never even loved me. Now that’s love.”

“She maintained a careful balance by her window, never allowing the men to come too close, never allowing them to stray too far.”

“You can call your turkey organic and torture it daily.”

“For how long could we fail until we surrendered?”

“Sometimes one simply wants to disappear.”

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

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

“People around the world were moving from one place to another. No one was staying.”

“She wanted more, more slang, more figures of speech, the bee's knees, the cats pajamas, horse of a different color, dog-tired, she wanted to talk like she was born here, like she never came from anywhere else”

“Everything I did, I did because I thought it was the correct thing to do… I am not a hero, it is true… But I am not a bad person, either.”

“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.”

“In my family, Father is the world champion at ending conversations.”

“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.”

“She repeats things until they are true, or until she can't tell whether they are true or not. She has become an expert at confusing what is with what was with what should be with what could be.”

“You only get to keep what you refuse to let go of.”

“He was someone whom everyone admired and liked but whom nobody knew. He was like a book that you could feel good holding, that you could talk about without ever having read, that you could recommend.”

“What do babies dream of? She must be dreaming of the before-life, just as I dream of the afterlife.”

“One of the greatest opportunities to live our values-or betray them-lies in the food we put on our plates.”

“I saw Herschel and he saw me and we stood next to each other because that is what friends do in the presence of evil or love.”

“I am not a bad person. I am a good person who has lived in a bad time."
Alex's grandfather.. Everything is Illuminated”

“They learned to hate her unknowability, her untouchability, the collage of her.”

“I zipped myself all the way into the sleeping bag of myself, not because I was hurt, and not because I had broken something, but because they were cracking up.”

“… and when is enough proof enough?”

“Well, let me leave it at this: if God does exist, He would have a great deal be sad about. And if He doesn’t exist, then that too would make Him quite sad, I imagine. So to answer your question, God must be sad.”

“We had everything to say to each other, but no ways to say it.”

“And she would say, "Today you believe in God?" And he would say, "Today I believe in love".”

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

“And how can you say I love you to someone you love? I rolled onto my side and fell asleep next to her. Here is the point of everything I have been trying to tell you, Oskar. It's always necessary.”

“What if I never stop inventing?”

“Money can't buy you happiness, but happiness isn't everything.”

“They reciprocated the great and saving lie--that our love for things is greater than our lover for our love for things--willfully playing the parts they wrote for themselves, willfully creating and believing fictions necessary for life.”

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

“We are being very nomadic with the truth, yes?”

“Everyone performs bad actions… A bad person is someone who does not lament his bad actions.”

“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?”

“And also, there are so many times when you need to make a quick escape, but humans don't have their own wings, or not yet, anyway, so what about a birdseed shirt?”

“That is what death is like. It doesn't matter what uniforms the soldiers are wearing. It doesn't matter how good the weapons are. I thought if everyone could see what I saw, we would never have war anymore.”

“It would be possible, in theory, for life and art to be reversed.”

“She was a genius of sadness, immersing herself in it, separating its numerous strands, appreciating its subtle nuances.”

“Love… is the immovability of truth.”

“Chickens can do many things, but they cannot make sophisticated deals with humans.”

“Your dad didn't die, so I won't be able to explain it to you.”