I missed you even when I was with you. That’s been my problem. I miss what I already have, and I surround myself with things that are missing.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOERYou 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.
More Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes
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Of course food has an important cultural use in families, but there are things that have more important cultural uses in families, and broadening the conversation out simply from what’s reasonable also allows in other things.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
We are lying to ourselves and to each other. Lying about what? I don’t care if we’re lying. I am a bad person. I don’t care. I don’t care what you are.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
In the morning, when the nothing vase casts a something shadow, like the memory of someone you’ve lost, what can you say about that?
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.
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She avoids mirrors, and lifts a powerful telescope to find herself.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
Sometimes you have to put your fears in order.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
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.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
Not responding is a response–we are equally responsible for what we don’t do. In the case of animal slaughter, to throw your hands in the air is to wrap your fingers around a knife handle.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
In truth I was manufacturing a brick wall of shits.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
This is love, she thought, isn’t it? When you notice someone’s absence and hate that absence more than anything? More, even, than you love his presence?
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 -
I could not believe in a God that would challenge faith like this.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
The French, who love their dogs, sometimes eat their horses. The Spanish, who love their horses, sometimes eat their cows. The Indians, who love their cows, sometimes eat their dogs.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
I was more alone than if I had been alone.
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 -
There are still many different ways to get stuck, existentially stuck. Feeling like, “This is worthless. I’m wasting my time, and I would be wasting the time of someone who tried to read this.” It happens all the time.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
In my family, Father is the world champion at ending conversations.
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 -
I thought for a minute, and then I got heavy, heavy boots.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
We spent our lives making livings.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
She had fallen in love so many times that she began to suspect she was not falling in love at all, but doing something much more ordinary.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
Let love write on you for awhile.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
This is my heart. You are touching it with your left hand. You are touching it with your left hand, not because you are left-handed, although you might be, but because I am holding it against my heart. What you are feeling is the beating of my heart. It is what keeps me alive.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER -
But come. No explaining or mending. Be beside me somewhere.
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 -
She let out a laugh, and then she put her hand over her mouth, like she was angry at herself for forgetting her sadness.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER