I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERWords are capable of making experience more vivid, and also of organizing it. They can scare us, and they can comfort us.
More Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes
-
-
Food serves two parallel purposes: it nourishes and it helps you remember. Eating and storytelling are inseparable-the saltwater is also tears; the honey not only tastes sweet, but makes us think of sweetness; the matzo is the bread of our affliction.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
In my family, Father is the world champion at ending conversations.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
Every moment before this one depends on this one.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
I watched the sheets breathe when she breathed, like how Dad used to say that trees inhale when people exhale, because I was too young to understand the truth about biological processes.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
The only thing more painful than being an active forgetter is to be an inert rememberer.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
Most of the times that I think about my relationship to Judaism, I not only accuse myself of a shallowness, but I feel certain that there’s a shallowness there. That’s not a bad thing, really.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
I felt shame for living in a nation of unprecedented prosperity-a nation that spends a smaller percentage of income on food than any other civilization has in human history-but in the name of affordability treats the animals it eats with cruelty so extreme it would be illegal if inflicted on a dog.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
Part of living your life is an awareness of the opportunities that can be missed and an awareness that time moves in one direction.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
One day you will do things for me that you hate. That is what it means to be family.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
If we communicated with something like music, we would never be misunderstood, because there is nothing in music to understand.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
He couldn’t bear to live, but he couldn’t bear to die. He couldn’t bear the thought of he making love to someone else, but neither could he bear the absence of the thought. And as for the note, he couldn’t bear to keep it, but he couldn’t bear to destroy it either.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
I think and think and think, I‘ve thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
She laughed enough to migrate an entire flock of birds. That was how she said yes.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
Sadness of not knowing enough words to [express what you mean].
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
If the thrill of hunting were in the hunt, or even in the marksmanship, a camera would do just as well.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
Only humans can cry tears.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
While it is always possible to wake a person who’s sleeping, no amount of noise will wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
I wasn’t having second thoughts, but I was having thoughts.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
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.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
We aren’t exactly emptying the oceans; it’s more like clear-cutting a forest with thousands of species to create massive fields with one type of soybean.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
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.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
One hundred years of joy can be erased in one second.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
The more you love someone, he came to think, the harder it is to tell them. It surprised him that strangers didn’t stop each other on the street to say I love you.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
I’m so afraid of losing something I love that I refuse to love anything.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
We believed in our grandmother’s cooking more fervently than we believed in God.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER