Quotes by Jonathan Safran Foer

People care about animals. I believe that. They just don’t want to know or to pay. A fourth of all chickens have stress fractures. It’s wrong. They’re packed body to body, and can’t escape their waste, and never see the sun. Their nails grow around the bars of their cages. It’s wrong. They feel their slaughters. It’s wrong, and people know it’s wrong. They don’t have to be convinced. They just have to act differently. I’m not better than anyone, and I’m not trying to convince people to live by my standards of what’s right. I’m trying to convince them to live by their own.

Two friends are ordering lunch. One says, Im in the mood for a burger, and orders it. The other says, Im in the mood for a burger, but remembers that there are things more important to him than what he is in the mood for at any given moment, and orders something else. Who is the sentimentalist?

As told by Kafkas close friend Max Brod:Suddenly he began to speak to the fish in their illuminated tanks. Now at least I can look at you in peace, I dont eat you anymore. It was the time he turned strictly vegetarian.

Her learning to sew (from a book Yankel brought back from Lvov) coincided with her refusal to wear any clothes that she did not make for herself, and when he bought her a book about animal physiology, she held the pictures to his face and said, Don’t you think it’s strange, Yankel, how we eat them?I’ve never eaten a picture.The animals. Don’t you find that strange? I can’t believe I never found it strange before. It’s like your name, how you don’t notice it for so long, but when you finally do, you can’t help but say it over and over, and wonder why you never thought it was strange that you should have that name, and that everyone has been calling you that name for your whole life.Yankel. Yankel. Yankel. Nothing so strange for me.I won’t eat them, at least not until it doesn’t seem strange to me.

He saw what they either couldnt see or couldnt allow themselves to see, and that only made him more pissed, because being less stupid than ones parents is repulsive, like taking a gulp from a glass of milk that you thought was orange juice.

A few days after we came home from the hospital, I sent a letter to a friend, including a photo of my son and some first impressions of fatherhood. He responded, simply, Everything is possible again. It was the perfect thing to write because that was exactly how it felt.

She died in my arms saying, “I don’t want to die.” That is what death is like. It doesn’t matter what uniforms the soldiers are wearing. It doesn’t matter how good the weapons are. I thought if everyone could see what I saw, we could never have war anymore.

Thanksgiving is the holiday that encompasses all others. All of them, from Martin Luther King Day to Arbor Day to Christmas to Valentines Day, are in one way or another about being thankful.

Its so hard to express yourself. I understand this.I want to express myself.The same is true for me. Im looking for my voice. Its in your mouth. I want to do something Im not ashamed of.Something you are proud of, yes? Not even. I just dont want to be ashamed.

Young friends, whose string-and-tin-can phone extended from island to island, had to pay out more and more string, as if letting kites go higher and higher. They had more and more to tell each other, and less and less string. The boy asked the girl to say I love you into her can, giving her no further explanation. And she didnt ask for any, or say Thats silly, or Were too young for love, or even suggest that she was saying I love you because he asked her to. Instead she said, I love you. The words traveled through the long, long string. The boy covered his can with a lid, removed it from the string, and put her love for him on a shelf in his closet. Of course, he never could open the can, because then he would lose its contents. It was enough just to know it was there.

Whats so horrible about being dead forever, and not feeling anything, and not even dreaming? Whats so great about feeling and dreaming?

Darling,You asked me to write you a letter, so I am writing you a letter. I do not know why I am writing you this letter, or what this letter is supposed to be about, but I am writing it nonetheless, because I love you very much and trust that you have some good purpose for having me write this letter. I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love.Your father

The dream thatwe are our fathers. I walked to the Brod,41without knowing why, and looked intomy reflection in the water. I couldn’t lookaway. What was the image that pulled mein after it? What was it that I loved? Andthen I recognized it. So simple. In thewater I saw my father’s face, and that facesaw the face of its father, and so on, and soon, reflecting backward to the beginningof time, to the face of God, in whoseimage we were created. We burned withlove for ourselves, all of us, starters ofthe fire we suffered—our love was the afflictionfor which only our love was thecure . . .

He promised us that everything would be OK. I was a child, but I knew that everything would not be OK. That did not make my father a liar. It made him my father.

I hated the gnawing longing that accompanied having everything.

She said, Do you have more things that you need, or more that you dont need? I said, It depends on what it means to need.

Its better to lose something than never to have had

So She had to satisfy herself with the idea of love-loving the loving of things whose existence she didnt care at all about. Love itself became the object of her love. She loved herself in love, she loved loving love, as love loves loving, and was able, in that way, to reconcile herself with a world that fell so short of what she would have hoped for.

Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.

Every moment before this one depends on this one.