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 FOERThe only thing more painful than being an active forgetter is to be an inert rememberer.
More Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes
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The meaning of my thoughts started to float away from me, like leaves that fall from a tree into a river, I was the tree, the world was the river.
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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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Food serves two parallel purposes: it nourishes and it helps you remember. Eating and storytelling are inseparable-the saltwater is also tears; the honey not only tastes sweet, but makes us think of sweetness; the matzo is the bread of our affliction.
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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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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.
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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?
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I never confused what I had with what I was.
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Fiction works when it makes a reader feel something strongly.
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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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I 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.
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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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The animals are those things that God likes but doesn’t love.
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The more exposure people have to the realities of factory farming, the more we will see people rejecting it. It’s already happening.
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It made me start to wonder if there were other people so lonely so close. I thought about “Eleanor Rigby.” It’s true, where do they all come from? And where do they all belong?
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I shook my tambourine the whole time, because it helped me remember that even though I was going through different neighborhoods, I was still me.
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You can call your turkey organic and torture it daily.
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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.
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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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She let out a laugh, and then she put her hand over her mouth, like she was angry at herself for forgetting her sadness.
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Why does watching a dog be a dog fill one with happiness?
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Ironically, the utterly unselective omnivore — “I’m easy; I’ll eat anything” — can appear more socially sensitive than the individual who tries to eat in a way that is good for society.
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I love sushi, I love fried chicken, I love steak. But there is a limit to my love.
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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.
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I have so much to say to you. I want to begin at the beginning, because that is what you deserve. I want to tell you everything, without leaving out a single detail. But where is the beginning? And what is everything?
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Whether we change our lives or do nothing, we have responded. To do nothing is to do something.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER