She extended a hand that I didn’t know how to take, so I broke its fingers with my silence.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERMy wife and I have chosen to bring up our children as vegetarians. In another time or place, we might have made a different decision. But the realities of our present moment compelled us to make that choice.
More Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes
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Songs are as sad as the listener.
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 -
Memory was supposed to fill the time, but it made time a hole to be filled.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
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.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
Food for her is not food, it is terror, dignity, gratitude, vengeance, joyfulness, humiliation, religion, history, and, of course, love. As if the fruit she always offered us were picked from the destroyed brances of out family tree.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
It broke my heart into more pieces than my heart was made of, why can’t people say what they mean at the time?
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
We talked about nothing in particular, but it felt like we were talking about the most important things.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
We could imagine all sorts of universes unlike this one, but this is the one that happened.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
I can only hold on to the things I want to lose.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
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.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
Feathers filled the small room. Our laughter kept the feathers in the air. I thought about birds. Could they fly is there wasn’t someone, somewhere, laughing?
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
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.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
I’d rather somebody hate what I do than be indifferent to it.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
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