Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

It was terrible. All of the things we couldn't share. The room was filled with conversations we weren't having.

People who become used to saying little become used to feeling little.

I'm sorry for my inability to let unimportant things go, for my inability to hold on to the important things.

We would have been safe.

Sometimes my hand starts to burn and I am convinced we are writing the same word at the same moment.

That's all anyone wants from anyone else, not love itself but the knowledge that love is there.

She wanted nothing more than someone to miss, to touch, with whom to speak like a child, with whom to be a child.

It's always possible to wake someone from sleep, but no amount of noise will wake someone who is pretending to be asleep.

With writing, we have second chances.

I've lived long enough to know I'm not one-hundred-percent anything!

Only humans can cry tears.

In my family, Father is the world champion at ending conversations.

It was not the feeling of completeness I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty.

People around the world were moving from one place to another. No one was staying.

You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.

Use humor as aggressively as chemo. Laugh until your hair falls out. There is nothing that can't be played for a laugh.

I try not to remember the life that I didn't want to lose but lost and have to remember

There are worse things, worse than being like us. Look, at least we're alive.

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.

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.

Why is taste, the crudest of our senses, exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other senses?

The bruises go away, and so does how you hate, and so does the feeling that everything you receive from life is something you have earned.

Dear Anna, we will live in a home with no walls, so that everywhere we go will be our home.

Why would a farmer lock the doors of his turkey farm?

I love the idea of books being more than books, or being, rather, something other than books.

There's nothing wrong with not understanding yourself.

It's not worth getting too excited about thinking about the larger picture. The larger picture doesn't come into focus for an awfully long time.

There has yet to be a human to survive a span of history without at least one end of the world.

There were so many different ways to die, and I just need to know which was his.

I was of the opinion that the past is past, and like all that is not now it should remain buried along the side of our memories.

I can only hold on to the things I want to lose.

Lvov is a city like New York City in America. New York City, in truth, was designed on the model of Lvov.

Writers now are putting total faith in designers at Apple and Amazon. It's almost like a race-car driver having no input into how cars are designed.

The only thing more painful than being an active forgetter is to be an inert rememberer.

When I looked at you, my life made sense. Even the bad things made sense. They were necessary to make you possible.

It's better to lose something than never to have had

It broke my heart into more pieces than my heart was made of, why can't people say what they mean at the time?

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.

They lay in silence, thinking their own thoughts, each trying to know the other's. They were becoming strangers on top of each other.

They do not desire anything more than everything they have known.

Their length could not be measured in years, just as an ocean could not explain the distance we have traveled, just as the dead can never be counted.

Please be truthful, but also please be benevolent, please.

I will walk without noise and I will open the door in darkness and I will

In truth I was manufacturing a brick wall of shits.

We all choose things, and we also all choose against things. I want to be the kind of person who chooses for more than chooses against ...

But there was always work to be done. We spent our lives making livings.

I always write out of a need to read something, rather than a need to write something.

Feeding my children is not like feeding myself: it matters more.

It stayed with him, like a part of him, like a birthmark, like a limb, it was on him, in him, him, his hymn: I had to do it for myself.

The sky slowly pulled up its blue dress to reveal night.

To remember my values, I need to lose certain tastes and find other handles for the memories that they once helped me carry.

The mistakes I've made are dead to me. But I can't take back the things I never did.

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.

Yes, I cannot dispute that she is crazy. But she is also compassionate.

And was the next word I lost, probably because it was so close to her name, what a simple word to say, what a profound word to lose.

That's the difference between heaven and hell! In hell we starve! In heaven we feed each other!

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?

I am blind. I am supposed to be retarded.

Every factory-farmed animal is, as a practice, treated in ways that would be illegal if it were a dog or a cat.

Nobody likes war not even those who survive it, not even the winners.

It is my great hope that our paths, however long and winding, will cross again.

She has become an expert at confusing what is with what was with what should be with what could be.

I just couldn't be dead any longer.

I am very simple to enchant.

He wanted to say, "Just say, 'You're my writer.'" But

When you are in a car, bitch or no bitch, you can do anything you desire as long as you remain on your side.

The more I found, the less I understood.

What's it about? she asked.
It's about love.
She laughed. They're all about love.

I wasn't having second thoughts, but I was having thoughts.

The Gypsy girl carved love letters into trees, filling the forest with notes for him.

You write to please yourself, you write to move yourself, to engage yourself in the asking of questions that are important to you.

She was like a drowning person, flailing, reaching for anything that might save her. Her life was an urgent, desperate struggle to justify her life.

I am sure people tell you this constantly but if you looked up 'incredibly beautiful' in the dictionary there would be a picture of you.

Oskar: I'm God!
Thomas: You're an atheist.
Oskar: I don't exist!

She maintained a careful balance by her window, never allowing the men to come too close, never allowing them to stray too far.

The only way to overcome sadness is to consume it.

These little daily choices that we're so used to thinking are irrelevant are the most important thing we do all day long.

I did not feel that he owed it to me. And I did not feel like I owed it to him. We owed it to each other, which is something different.

What's weird," I said, "is that I've never seen you cry." He said, "I cry all the time.

Compassion is a muscle that gets stronger with use, and the regular exercise of choosing kindness over cruelty would change us.

I'm possibly possible.

I know you look both ways before you cross the street, but I want you to look both ways a second time, because I told you to.

A Seeing Eye bitch is not only for blind people but for people who pine for the negative of loneliness.

Succotash my cocker spaniel, you fudging crevasse-hole dipshiitake!

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 can't bake any more bread.

Before you rush off trying to see everything you can, educate yourself.

Technology celebrates connectedness, but encourages retreat.

Once you hear something, you can never return to the time before you heard it.

I want to talk about God in a literary way. But I think I would have a very hard time praying to God.

In the end, everyone loses everyone.

The Eskimos have four hundred words for snow, and the Jewshave four hundred for schmuck.

Herschel was a Jew."
"And he was my best friend."
"He was his best friend."
"And I murdered him.

Our stories are so fundamental to us that it's easy to forget that we choose them.

[ ... ]It is as if after surviving so much, there was no longer reason to survive.

Be the instrument playing the sound of your life's passing

Fiction works when it makes a reader feel something strongly.

She laughed, I love it when she laughs, although the truth is I am not in love with her.

Even Alf is not humorous at times.

We have waged war, or rather let a war be waged, against all of the animals we eat. This war is new and has a name: factory farming.

Your dad didn't die, so I won't be able to explain it to you.