Quotes by Jonathan Safran Foer

I need an office, so I can have a place where I don't write.

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

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.

It's not the feeling of completeness I need, but the feeling of not being empty.

I'm so afraid of losing something I love, that I refuse to love anything.

Whether we're talking about fish species, pigs, or some other eaten animal, is such suffering the most important thing in the world? Obviously not. But that's not the question. Is it more important than sushi, bacon, or chicken nuggets? That's the question.

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

Weeks passed like boats waiting to sail into the starless dawn, we were full of aimless endless darkness.

People always ask what a book is about, as if it has to be about something. I don't want to write books that lend themselves to that sort of description. My books are more a kind of breaking-down.

Again and again we are confronted with the reality -- some might say the problem -- of sharing our space with other living things, be they dogs, trees, fish or penguins.

Maybe that's what a person's personality is: the difference between the inside and the outside.

Only someone who'd never been an animal would put up a sign saying not to feed them.

I could not believe in a God that would challenge faith like this.

Memory was supposed to fill the time, but it made time a hole to be filled.

There are many premium writers, yes? Tolstoy, yes? He wrote War, and also Peace, which are both premium books.

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

Then I have some bad news for you, because humans are going to destroy each other as soon as it becomes easy enough to, which will be very soon.

I realized that your mother couldn't see the emptiness, she couldn't see anything...All of the words I'd written to her over all of those years, had I never said anything to hear at all?

Was his death an essential stage in the continuation of his life?

Because it was starting to get dark, and because the streets were crowded, I bumped into a googolplex people. Who were they? Where were they going? What were they looking for? I wanted to hear their heartbeats, and I wanted them to hear mine.

It's much easier to be cruel than one might think.

Oh, I'd say I like a meal as much as anybody. But I find a certain kind of foodiness silly, gluttonous and embarrassing.

Why are you leaving me?
He wrote, I do not know how to live.
I do not know either but I am trying.
I do not know how to try.
There were some things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him. So i buried them and let them hurt me.

Between 1950 and 1970, the number of American farms declined by half, the number of people employed in farming declined by half, and the size of the average farm doubled. During that time, the size of the average chicken has doubled.

In the meantime, while I think-while you think, while we think-our actions and inactions create and destroy the world.

At this moment in the environmental movement, we can jump from the bridge, or we can cross it. We can allow the fear that it's too late or too difficult to ensure resources for future generations to incapacitate us, or we can allow those fears to capacitate us.

It is dangerous to pretend that we know more than we do. But it is even more dangerous to pretend that we know less.

According to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, if cows were a country, they would rank third in greenhouse gas emissions, after China and the United States.

If we don't demonstrate solidarity through small collective sacrifices, we will not win the war, and if we do not win the war, we will lose the childhood home of every human who has ever lived.

Changing how we eat will not be enough, on its own, to save the planet, but we cannot save the planet without changing how we eat.

We can choose to make changes, or we can be subject to other changes -- mass migration, disease, armed conflict, a greatly diminished quality of life -- but there is no future without change. The luxury of choosing which changes we prefer has an expiration date.

Our minds and hearts are well built to perform certain tasks, and poorly designed for others. We are good at things like calculating the path of a hurricane, and bad at things like deciding to get out of its way.

The end of the world has come often, and continues to come.

Since the world has changed so much, the same values don't lead to the same choices anymore.

I don't think that there are any limits to how excellent we could make life seem.

All that mattered was him looking at me.

Hunting will never feed lots of people; it will always be a hobby.

Sadness and joy aren't opposites of each other. They are each the opposite of indifference.

It took me as long as I had known him to get rid of all of his words. Like turning an hourglass over.

I watched the sheets breathe when she breathed, like how Dad used to say that trees inhale when people exhale, because I was too young to understand the truth about biological processes.

Long before man traveled into space, rabbis debated how one would observe Shabbat there-not because they anticipated space travel but because Buddhists strive to live with questions and Jews would rather die.

The hardest part of writing is not to get the ideas but to remember, why it is important to get them.

Parents are always more knowledgeable than their children, and children are always smarter than their parents.

Anyone who believes that a second is faster than a decade did not live life.

My life story is the story of everyone I've ever met.

I went to the guest room and pretended to write. I hit the space bar again and again and again. My life story was spaces.

What's so horrible about being dead forever, and not feeling anything, and not even dreaming? What's so great about feeling and dreaming?

I felt, that night, on that stage, under that skull, incredibly close to everything in the universe, but also extremely alone.

So many people enter and leave your life! Hundreds of thousands of people! You have to keep the door open so they can come in! But it also means you have to let them go!

Every moment before this one depends on this one.

The end of suffering does not justify the suffering, what a mess I am, I thought, what a fool, how foolish and narrow, how worthless, how pinched and pathetic, how helpless.

It was the first time I had ever made love. I wondered if he knew that. It felt like crying. I wondered, Why does anyone ever make love?

I can't even say 'hair pie,'' I told him, 'unless I'm talking about an actual pie made out of rabbits.

Today, it isn't unusual for meat to travel almost halfway around the globe to reach your supermarket. The average distance our meat travels hovers arounf fifteen hundred miles.

Highs and lows make you feel that things matter, but they're nothing.

I want an infinitely blank book and the rest of time.

Living on a planet of fixed size requires compromise, and while we are the only party capable of negotiating, we are not the only party at the table. We've never claimed more, and we've never had less.

I put my hands into the pockets of all his jackets.

We need enormous pockets, pockets big enough for our families and our friends, and even the people who aren't on our lists, people we've never met but still want to protect. We need pockets for boroughs and for cities, a pocket that could hold the universe.

I'm so afraid of losing something I love that I refuse to love anything.

I tried to think about other things. I tried to invent optimistic inventions. But the pessimistic ones were extremely loud.

And when is enough proof enough?

I don't mind if smiles come at my expense, I'm a small price to pay.

What kind of world would we create if three times a day we activated our compassion and reason as we sat down to eat, if we had the moral imagination and the pragmatic will to change our most fundamental act of consumption?

Being reliable is something. Being good.

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

In the water I saw my father's face, and that face saw the face of its father, and so on, and so on, reflecting backward to the beginning of time, to the face of God, in whose image we were created.

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.

Profound, bottomless self-doubt -- it has no value -- what's the point? In a way, it takes up as much time as anything else.

The writing itself is no big deal. The editing, and even more than that, the self-doubt, is excruciatingly impossible.

He was sculpting me. He was trying to make me so he could fall in love with me .

You're incredibly beautiful,' I told her, because she was fat, so I thought it would be an especially nice compliment, and also make her like me again, even though I was sexist.

I felt suddenly shy. I was not used to shy. I was used to shame. Shyness is when you turn your head away from something you want. Shame is when you turn your head away from something you do not want.

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.

We are breeding creatures incapable of surviving in any place other than the most artificial settings. We have focused the awesome power of modern genetic knowledge to bring into being animals that suffer more.

Imagine being served a plate of sushi. But this plate also holds all of the animals that were killed for your serving of sushi. The plate might have to be five feet across.

Humans are the only animal that blushes, laughs, has religion, wages war, and kisses with lips. So in a way, the more you kiss with lips, the more human you are. And the more you wage war.

People shouldn't be allowed to get married until it's too late to have kids.

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.

It's rarely talked about, but hunting for sport is just about as vile as we humans get.

But I still couldn't figure out what it all meant. The more I found out, the less I understood.

The philosopher Elaine Scarry has observed that beauty always takes place in the particular. Cruelty, on the other hand, prefers abstraction.

Literature has drawn a funny perimeter that other art forms haven't.