Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

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.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

What is suffering? I'm not sure what it is, but I know that suffering is the name we give to the origin of all the sighs, screams, and groans — small and large, crude and multifaceted — that concern us. The word defines our gaze even more than what we are looking at.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

And how can you say I love you to someone you love? I rolled onto my side and fell asleep next to her. Here is the point of everything I have been trying to tell you, Oskar. It's always necessary.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

I wanted to cry but I didn't, I probably should have cried, I should have drowned us there in the room ending our suffering.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

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

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

She wanted more, more slang, more figures of speech, the bee's knees, the cats pajamas, horse of a different color, dog-tired, she wanted to talk like she was born here, like she never came from anywhere else

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

...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.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Highs and lows make you feel that things matter, but they're nothing. So what's something? Being reliable is something. Being good.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

She told him of ship voyages she had taken to places he had never heard of, and stories he knew were all untrue, were bad non-truths, even, but he nodded and tried to convince himself to be convinced, tried to believe her, because he knew that the origin of a story is always an absence, and he wanted her to live among presences.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Elsewhere the paper notes that vegetarians and vegans (including athletes) 'meet and exceed requirements' for protein. And, to render the whole we-should-worry-about-getting-enough-protein-and-therefore-eat-meat idea even more useless, other data suggests that excess animal protein intake is linked with osteoporosis, kidney disease, calcium stones in the urinary tract, and some cancers. Despite some persistent confusion, it is clear that vegetarians and vegans tend to have more optimal protein consumption than omnivores.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

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.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

We need a better way to talk about eating animals. We need a way that brings meat to the center of public discussion in the same way it is often at the center of our plates. This doesn't require that we pretend we are going to have a collective agreement. However strong our intuitions are about what's right for us personally and even about what's right for others, we all know in advance that our positions will clash with those of our neighbors. What do we do with that most inevitable reality? Drop the conversation, or find a way to reframe it?

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

It can be challenge enough to have to eat with myself.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

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.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

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

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Rationally, factory farming is so obviously wrong, in so many ways. In all of my reading and conversations, I've yet to find a credible defense of it. But food is not rational. Food is culture, habit, and identity.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

She extended a hand that I didn't know how to take, so I broke its fingers with my silence.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Why does watching a dog be a dog fill one with happiness?

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Scientific studies and government records suggest that virtually all (upwards of 95 percent of) chickens become infected with E. coli (an indicator of fecal contamination) and between 39 and 75 percent of chickens in retail stores are still infected. Around 8 percent of birds become infected with salmonella (down from several years ago, when at least one in four birds was infected, which still occurs on some farms). Seventy to 90 percent are infected with another potentially deadly pathogen, campylobacter. Chlorine baths are commonly used to remove slime, odor, and bacteria.Of course, consumers might notice that their chickens don't taste quite right - how good could a drug-stuffed, disease-ridden, shit-contaminated animal possibly taste? - but the birds will be injected (or otherwise pumped up) with broths and salty solutions to give them what we have come to think of as the chicken look, smell, and taste. (A recent study by Consumer Reports found that chicken and turkey products, many labeled as natural, ballooned with 10 to 30 percent of their weight as broth, flavoring, or water.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Being reliable is something. Being good.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

There were things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him. So I buried them, and let them hurt me.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Are you an optimist or a pessimist? I can't remember. Which? Do you know what those words mean? Not really. An optimist is positive and hopeful. A pessimist is negative and cynical. I'm an optimist. Well, that's good, because there’s no irrefutable evidence. There’s nothing that could convince someone who doesn’t want to be convinced. But there is an abundance of clues that would give the wanting believer something to hold on to.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

One can build a perfect home, but not live in it.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

He chose illness, because he knew of no other way to be seen. Not even by those looking at him.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

It is best if the guard is in love with America and wants to overawe the American by being a premium guard. This kind of guard thinks that he will encounter the American again one day in America, and that the American will offer to take him to a Chicago Bulls game, and buy him blue jeans and whitebread and delicate toilet paper. This guard dreams of speaking Englishwithout an accent and obtaining a wife with an unmalleable bosom. This guard will confess that he does not love where he lives.The other kind of guard is also in love with America, but he will hate the American for being an American. This is worst. This guard knows he will never go to America, and knows that he will never meet the American again. He will steal from the American, and terror the American, only to teach that he can.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

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.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

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.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

He looked so much like me, I could tell that he saw it, too, we shared the smile of recognizing ourselves in each other, how many imposters do I have? DO we all make the same mistakes, or has one of us gotten it right, or even just a bit less wrong, am I the imposter?

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

she also liked to remember that there could be no such thing as an intentional imperfection. People are always mistaking something that looks good for something that feels good.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

I once went to report on a village in Russia, a community of artists who were forced to flee the cities! I'd heard that paintings hung everywhere! I heard you couldn't see the walls through all of the paintings! They'd 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 couldn't feed themselves, because they couldn't get their hands to their mouths! So you know what they did!' 'They starved?' 'They fed each other! That's the difference between heaven and hell! In hell we starve! In heaven we feed each other!

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

To feel alone is to be alone.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

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

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

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.You never bake bread, he wrote, and we were still joking.Then it's like I woke up and baked bread, I said, and we were joking even then. I wondered will there come a time when we won't 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.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

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

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

It shouldn't be the consumer's responsibility to figure out what's cruel and what's kind, what's environmentally destructive and what's sustainable. Cruel and destructive food products should be illegal. We don't need the option of buying children's toys made with lead paint, or aerosols with chlorofluorocarbons, or medicines with unlabeled side effects. And we don't need the option of buying factory-farmed animals.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Humans are the only animals that have children on purpose, keep in touch (or don't), 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.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

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.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

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.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

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.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

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.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer