Do you eat chicken because you are familiar with the scientific literature on them and have decided that their suffering doesn’t matter, or do you do it because it tastes good?
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERIsn’t it strange how upset people get about a few dozen baseball players taking growth hormones, when we’re doing what we’re doing to our food animals and feeding them to our children?
More Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes
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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
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One of the greatest opportunities to live our values-or betray them-lies in the food we put on our plates.
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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.
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Words are capable of making experience more vivid, and also of organizing it. They can scare us, and they can comfort us.
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You do not have to utter anything you do not want to utter,” I told her, and she said, “Then I would never utter another word again.” “You do not have to do anything that you do not want to do.” “Then I would never do anything again.
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Art can be very political but that can’t be the purpose of art, it can’t be the driving force. It isn’t with any of the books that I love, anyway.
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I’m sorry for my inability to let unimportant things go, for my inability to hold on to the important things.
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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.
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Worthy would-be worlds of words, whorls of working wonder.
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I wasn’t having second thoughts, but I was having thoughts.
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There’s nothing wrong with not understanding yourself.
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I put my hand on the doorknob because I thought maybe her hand was on the doorknob on the other side.
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He promised us that everything would be okay. I was a child, but I knew that everything would not be okay. That did not make my father a liar. It made him my father.
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I try not to remember the life that I didn’t want to lose but lost and have to remember,
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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?
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But I believe that things are extremely complicated, and her looking over me was as complicated as anything could ever be. But it was also incredibly simple.
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The mistakes I’ve made are dead to me. But I can’t take back the things I never did.
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I wasn’t trying to invent better and better homes, but to show her that homes didn’t matter, we could live in any home, in any city, in any country, in any century, and be happy, as if the world were just what we lived in.
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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.
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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.
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One day you will do things for me that you hate. That is what it means to be family.
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Every night before putting her to sleep, Yankel counts her ribs, as if one might have disappeared in the course of the day and become the seed and soil for some new companion to steal her away from him.
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We could imagine all sorts of universes unlike this one, but this is the one that happened.
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Please be truthful, but also please be benevolent, please.
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I woke up once in the middle of the night, and Buckminster’s paws were on my eyelids. He must have been feeling my nightmares.
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We had everything to say to each other, but no ways to say it.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER