Everything else happened – why not the things that could have?
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERI didn’t feel empty. I wished I’d felt empty. … I wanted to be empty like an overturned pitcher. But I was full like a stone.
More Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes
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You can call your turkey organic and torture it daily.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
Sometimes people who seem good end up being not as good as you might have hoped, you know?
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 -
Words never mean what we want them to mean.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
My 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.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
Everything I did, I did because I thought it was the correct thing to do, I am not a hero, it is true, But I am not a bad person, either.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
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.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
Not responding is a response – we are equally responsible for what we don’t do.
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 -
Tomorrow was over the horizon, and would take an entire day to reach.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
I want an infinitely blank book and the rest of time.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
You are the only one who has understood even a whisper of me, and I will tell you that I am the only person who has understood even a whisper of you.
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 -
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