Quotes by Jonathan Safran Foer

I once went to report on a village in Russia, a community of artists who were forced to flee the cities! Id heard that paintings hung everywhere! I heard you couldnt see the walls through all of the paintings! Theyd painted the ceilings, the 82plates, the windows, the lampshades! Was it an act of rebellion! An act of expression! Were the paintings good, or was that beside the point! I needed to see it for myself, and I needed to tell the world about it! I used to live for reporting like that! Stalin found out about the community and sent his thugs in, just a few days before I got there, to break all of their arms! That was worse than killing them! It was a horrible sight, Oskar: their arms in crude splints, straight in front of them like zombies! They couldnt feed themselves, because they couldnt get their hands to their mouths! So you know what they did! They starved? They fed each other! Thats the difference between heaven and hell! In hell we starve! In heaven we feed each other!

To feel alone is to be alone.

In my dream, people apologized for things that were about to happen, and lit candles by inhaling.

I got tired, I told him. Not worn out, but worn through. Like one of those wives who wakes up one morning and says I cant bake any more bread.You never bake bread, he wrote, and we were still joking.Then its like I woke up and baked bread, I said, and we were joking even then. I wondered will there come a time when we wont be joking? And what would it look like? And how would that feel?When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calender that showed the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did. Where the smoke from the chimney ended. How an overturned bottle rested at the edge of a table.I spent my life learning to feel less.Every day I felt less.Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.

I spent my life learning to feel less. Every day I felt less. Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?

It shouldnt be the consumers responsibility to figure out whats cruel and whats kind, whats environmentally destructive and whats sustainable. Cruel and destructive food products should be illegal. We dont need the option of buying childrens toys made with lead paint, or aerosols with chlorofluorocarbons, or medicines with unlabeled side effects. And we dont need the option of buying factory-farmed animals.

Humans are the only animals that have children on purpose, keep in touch (or dont), care about birthdays, waste and lose time, brush their teeth, feel nostalgia, scrub stains, have religions and political parties and laws, wear keepsakes, apologize years after an offense, whisper, fear themselves, interpret dreams, hide their genitalia, shave, bury time capsules, and can choose not to eat something for reasons of conscience. The justifications for eating animals and for not eating them are often identical: we are not them.

A simple trick from the backyard astronomer: if you are having trouble seeing something, look slightly away from it. The most light-sensitive parts of our eyes (those we need to see dim objects) are on the edges of the region we normally use for focusing. Eating animals has an invisible quality. Thinking about dogs, and their relationship to the animals we eat, is one way of looking askance and making something invisible visible.

The choice-obsessed modern West is probably more accommodating to individuals who choose to eat differently than any other culture has ever been, but 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. Food choices are determined by many factors, but reason (even consciousness) is not generally high on the list.

Before child labor laws, there were businesses that treated their ten-year-old employees well. society didn’t ban child labor because it’s impossible to imagine children working in a good environment, but because when you give that much power to businesses over powerless individuals, it’s corrupting. When we walk around thinking we have a greater right to eat an animal than the animal has a right to live without suffering, it’s corrupting.

The persistence of the story of animal consent into the contemporary era tells of a human appreciation of the stakes, and a desire to do the right thing.

Our response to the factory farm is ultimately a test of how we respond to the powerless, to the most distant, to the voiceless - it is a test of how we act when no one is forcing us to act one way or another. Consistency is not required, but engagement with the problem is.

We perhaps know more than we care to admit, keeping it down in the dark places of our memory-disavowed. When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own.

When we lift our forks, we hang our hats somewhere. We set ourselves in one relationship or another to farmed animals, farm-workers, national economies, and global markets. Not making a decision--eating like everyone else--is to make the easiest decision, a decision that is increasingly problematic.

Whether we change our lives or do nothing, we have responded. To do nothing is to do something.

Do you eat chicken because you are familiar with the scientific literature on them and have decided that their suffering doesnt matter, or do you do it because it tastes good?

...only someone whod never been an animal would put up a sign saying not to feed them....

This brings me back to the image of Kafka standing before a fish in the Berlin aquarium, a fish on which his gaze fell in a newly found peace after he decided not to eat animals. Kafka recognized that fish as a member of his invisible family- not as his equal, of course, but as another being that was his concern.

We know, at least, that this decision (ending factory farming) will help prevent deforestation, curb global warming, reduce pollution, save oil reserves, lessen the burden on rural America, decrease human rights abuses, improve publish health, and help eliminate the most systematic animal abuse in history.

The animals are those things that God likes but doesnt love.