I have no need for the past, I thought, like a child. I did not consider that the past might have a need for me.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERI try not to remember the life that I didn’t want to lose but lost and have to remember,
More Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes
-
-
Memory was supposed to fill the time, but it made time a hole to be filled. Each second was two hundred yards, to be walked, crawled. You couldn’t see the next hour, it was so far in the distance. Tomorrow was over the horizon, and would take an entire day to reach.
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 -
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 FOER -
Isn’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?
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
She was with me. She did all of those things and so many more, things I would never tell anyone, and she never even loved me. Now that’s love.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
My point is that there are a lot of forces, like the media and the general political rhetoric tells us we should have more. That we should do better than our parents and have a bigger house or a better car.
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 -
A few weeks after the worst day, I started writing lots of letters. I don’t know why, but it was one of the only things that made my boots lighter.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
I took the world into me, rearranged it, and sent it back out as a question: “Do you like me?
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
Sometimes people who seem good end up being not as good as you might have hoped, you know?
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
Whether we change our lives or do nothing, we have responded. To do nothing is to do something.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
We live in a world made up more of story than stuff. We are creatures of memory more than reminders, of love more than likes.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
Just to be a functioning adult in the world, we develop all of these layers of protection. When we see homeless people, we don’t cry, even though homeless people probably deserve our tears – you know, it’s a horrible thing.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
Every factory-farmed animal is, as a practice, treated in ways that would be illegal if it were a dog or a cat.
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