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Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes
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Jonathan Safran Foer is an American novelist. He is best known for his novels Everything Is Illuminated , Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close , and for his non-fiction work Eating Animals . His most recent novel, Here I Am, was published in 2016. He teaches creative writing at New York University.

✵ 21. February 1977
Jonathan Safran Foer photo
Jonathan Safran Foer: 262   quotes 52   likes

Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

“Writing's funny, it's like walking down a hall in the dark looking for the light switch, and suddenly you find it, flip it on, and then you discover the hallway you passed through is papered with the novel you've written.”

Jonathan Safran Foer
Light

“Good people don’t make fewer mistakes, they’re just better at apologizing.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Here I Am

Source: Here I Am

People

“the desire to wring out a few more drips of happiness almost always destroyed the happiness you were so lucky to have, and so foolish never to acknowledge.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Here I Am

Source: Here I Am

Happiness

“Yesterday I wanted to turn inside out.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Tree of Codes

Source: Tree of Codes

“The sky slowly pulled up its blue dress to reveal night.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Everything Is Illuminated

Source: Everything Is Illuminated

Night

“I tried to think about other things. I tried to invent optimistic inventions. But the pessimistic ones were extremely loud.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Thinking

“In the morning, when the nothing vase casts a something shadow, like the memory of someone you've lost, what can you say about that?”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Memory

“I'm so afraid of losing something I love that I refuse to love anything,' maybe that would have made the impossible possible. Maybe, but I couldn't do it, I had buried too much too deeply inside me. And here I am, instead of there.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Love

“If we communicated with something like music, we would never be misunderstood, because there is nothing in music to understand.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Everything Is Illuminated

Source: Everything Is Illuminated

Music , Communication , Understanding

“I’m not smarter than you, I’m more knowledgeable than you, and that’s only because I’m older than you. Parents are always more knowledgeable than their children, and children are always smarter than their parents.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Children , Knowledge , Parent

“… an infinitely blank book and the rest of time.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Variant: I want an infinitely blank book and the rest of time.
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Books , Time

“Our stories are so fundamental to us that it’s easy to forget that we choose them.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Here I Am

Source: Here I Am

Forgetting

“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.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“She avoids mirrors, and lifts a powerful telescope to find herself.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Everything Is Illuminated

Source: Everything Is Illuminated

“I don't mind if smiles come at my expense, I'm a small price to pay.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Smile

“It is not a thing that you can imagine. It only is. After that, there can be no imagining.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Everything Is Illuminated

Source: Everything Is Illuminated

Imagination

“I'm not better than anyone, and I'm not trying to convince people to live by my standards of what's right. I'm trying to convince them to live by their own.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Eating Animals

Source: Eating Animals (2009)
Context: People care about animals. I believe that. They just don't want to know or to pay. A fourth of all chickens have stress fractures. It's wrong. They're packed body to body, and can't escape their waste, and never see the sun. Their nails grow around the bars of their cages. It's wrong. They feel their slaughters. It's wrong, and people know it's wrong. They don't have to be convinced. They just have to act differently. I'm not better than anyone, and I'm not trying to convince people to live by my standards of what's right. I'm trying to convince them to live by their own.

People

“Imagine being served a plate of sushi. But this plate also holds all of the animals that were killed for your serving of sushi. The plate might have to be five feet across.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Eating Animals

Source: Eating Animals

Imagination , Animals

“I flipped back through the pad of paper while I thought about what Stephen Hawking would do next.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“Am I such a bad person for dreaming of a world that ends when I do? I don't mean the world ending with respect to me, but every set of eyes closing with mine.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

World , Dreams , Personality

“I used to tuck her … but now she tucked my feelings into the woven arteries of my veins.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Everything Is Illuminated

Everything Is Illuminated (2002)

Feeling

“The responsibility lies with the mentality of the meat industry that treats both animals and "human capital" like machines … human beings cannot be human (much less humane) under the conditions of a factory farm or slaughterhouse.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Eating Animals

Eating Animals (2009)

Animals

“So many visitors came to rub and kiss different parts of him for the fulfillment of their various wishes that his entire body had to be rebronzed every month. He was a changing god, destroyed and recreated by his believers, destroyed and recreated by their belief… Those who prayed came to believe less and less in the god of their creation and more and more in their belief.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Everything Is Illuminated

Everything Is Illuminated (2002)

God , Kiss , Change , Parting

“Stalin found out about the community and sent his thugs in, just a few days before I got there, to break all of their arms! That was worse than killing them! It was a horrible sight, Oskar: their arms in crude splints, straight in front of them like zombies! They couldn't feed themselves, because they couldn't get their hands to their mouths! So you know what they did!" "They starved?" "They fed each other! That's the difference between heaven and hell! In hell we starve! In heaven we feed each other!" I don't believe in the afterlife.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

"Neither do I, but I believe in the story."
Mr. Black talking with Oskar
"Heavier Boots" (p. 142)
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005)

Communication , Hell

“Just how destructive does a culinary preference have to be before we decide to eat something else?”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Eating Animals

Eating Animals (2009)

“She spent the afternoon staring at their front door. "Waiting for someone?" Yankel asked. "What color is this?" He stood very close to the door, letting the end of his nose touch the peephole. He licked the wood and joked, "It certainly tastes like red." "Yes, it is red, isn't it?" "Seems so." She buried her head in her hands. "But couldn’t it be just a bit more red?"”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Everything Is Illuminated

Source: Everything Is Illuminated (2002), pp. 79-80

Color , Waiting

“When I was your age, my grandfather bought me a ruby bracelet. It was too big for me and would slide up and down my arm. It was almost a necklace. He later told me that he had asked the jeweler to make it that way. Its size was supposed to be a symbol of his love. More rubies, more love. But I could not wear it comfortably. I could not wear it at all. So here is the point of everything I have been trying to say. If I were to give a bracelet to you, now, I would measure your wrist twice.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), p. 79

Love , Age , Way

“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.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Everything Is Illuminated

Everything Is Illuminated (2002)

Love , Health , Way

“Every parent who loses a child finds a way to laugh again. The timbre begins to fade. The edge dulls. The hurt lessens. Every love is carved from loss. Mine was. Yours is. Your great-great-great-children's will be. But we learn to live with that love.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Everything Is Illuminated

Everything Is Illuminated (2002)

Love , Children , Way , Parent

“I wanted to build walls around him, I wanted to separate inside from outside, I wanted to give him an infinitely long blank book and the rest of time.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), p. 280

Books , Time

“By the standards of the international human rights community, the typical working conditions in America's slaughterhouses constitute human rights violations.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Eating Animals

Eating Animals (2009)

Communication

“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. Table, ivory elephant charm, rainbow, onion, hairdo, mollusk, Shabbos, violence, cuticle, melodrama, ditch, honey, doily … None of it moved her. She addressed her world honestly, searching for something deserving of the volumes of love she knew she had within her, but to each she would have to say, I don’t love you.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Everything Is Illuminated

Everything Is Illuminated (2002)

Love , Life , World , Search

“SADNESSES OF THE COVENANT: Sadness of God's love; Sadness of God's back [sic]; Favorite-child sadness; Sadness of b[ein]g sad in front of one's God; Sadness of the opposite of belief [sic]; What if? Sadness; Sadness of God alone in heaven; Sadness of a God who would need people to pray to Him…”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Everything Is Illuminated

Everything Is Illuminated (2002)

Love , God , People , Sadness

“He had a wall of masks from every country he‘d been to, like Armenia and Chile and Ethiopia. It‘s not a horrible world, he told me, but it‘s filled with a lot of horrible people.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005)

People , World , Country

“But more than that, no unloving words were ever spoken, and everything was held up as another small piece of proof that it can be this way, it doesn't have to be that way; if there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it heavy 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 jeweler's felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Everything Is Illuminated

Everything Is Illuminated (2002)

Love , World , Way

“Ray Black was in prison, so we weren't able to talk to him. I did some research on the internet and found out that he was in prison because he murdered two children after he raped them. There were also pictures of the dead children, and even though I knew it would only hurt me to look at them, I did. I printed them out and put them in *Stuff That Happened To Me*, right after the picture of Jean-Pierre Haigneré, the french astronaut who had to be carried from his spacecraft after returning form the MIR spacestation, because gravity isn't only what makes us fall, it's what makes our muscles strong.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005)

Children , Strong , Hurt , Dead

“I put my hand on him. Touching him has always been important to me, it was something I lived for. I never could explain why. Little, nothing touches, my fingers against his shoulder, the outsides of our thighs touching as we squeeled together on the bus. I couldnt explain it, but I needed it. Sometimes I imagined stiching all of our little touches together. How many hundreds of thousands of fingers brushing against each other does it take to make love?”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005)

Imagination , Love , Making love