Jonathan Safran Foer: Quotes about life

Jonathan Safran Foer is Novelist. Explore interesting quotes on life.
Jonathan Safran Foer: 524 quotes52 likes

“I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“So many people enter and leave your life! Hundreds of thousands of people! You have to keep the door open so they can come in! But it also means you have to let them go!”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), p. 153

“It's a shame that we have to live, but it's a tragedy that we get to live only one life.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“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?”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005)
Context: I felt that night, on the stage, incredibly close to everything in the universe, but also extremely alone. 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? What's so horrible about being dead forever, and not feeling anything, and not even dreaming? What's so great about feeling and dreaming? (p. 145)

“When I looked at you, my life made sense. Even the bad things made sense. They were necessary to make you possible.”

Jonathan Safran Foer

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

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“I don't think that there are any limits to how excellent we could make life seem.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Everything Is Illuminated

Source: Everything Is Illuminated

“The bruises go away, and so does how you hate, and so does the feeling that everything you receive from life is something you have earned.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Everything Is Illuminated

Source: Everything Is Illuminated

“She was like a drowning person, flailing, reaching for anything that might save her. Her life was an urgent, desperate struggle to justify her life.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Everything Is Illuminated

Source: Everything Is Illuminated

“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.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“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.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“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.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Oskar's grandmother to his grandfather after she told him of her pregnancy.
"My Feelings" (p. 180)
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005)

“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.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“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?”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Eating Animals

Source: Eating Animals

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

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“I used to think that humor was the only way to appreciate how wonderful and terrible the world is, to celebrate how big life is. But now I think the opposite. Humor is a way of shrinking from that wonderful and terrible world.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Everything Is Illuminated

Source: Everything Is Illuminated (2002)

“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.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

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

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“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.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“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.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close