Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

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.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

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.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

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.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

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

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Do you eat chicken because you are familiar with the scientific literature on them and have decided that their suffering doesn't matter, or do you do it because it tastes good?

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

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

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

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.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

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.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

The animals are those things that God likes but doesn't love.

~ 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.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Two friends are ordering lunch. One says, 'I'm in the mood for a burger,' and orders it. The other says, 'I'm 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?

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

As told by Kafka's 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 don't eat you anymore.' It was the time he turned strictly vegetarian.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

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.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

He saw what they either couldn't see or couldn't allow themselves to see, and that only made him more pissed, because being less stupid than one's parents is repulsive, like taking a gulp from a glass of milk that you thought was orange juice.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

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.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

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.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

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

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

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

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

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

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

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

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

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 . . .

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

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.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

I hated the gnawing longing that accompanied having everything.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

She said, Do you have more things that you need, or more that you don't need? I said, It depends on what it means to need.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

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

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

So She had to satisfy herself with the idea of love-loving the loving of things whose existence she didn't 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.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

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

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Every moment before this one depends on this one.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

You only get to keep what you refuse to let go of

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

August has passed, and yet summer continues by force to grow days. They sprout secretly between the chapters of the year, covertly included between its pages.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Does it break my heart, of course, every moment of every day, into more pieces than my heart was made of...

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

And this is what living next to a waterfall is like, Safran. Every widow wakes one morning, perhaps after years of pure and unwavering grieving, to realize she slept a good night's sleep, and will be able to eat breakfast, and doesn't hear her husband's ghost all the time, but only some of the time. Her grief is replaced with useful sadness. Every parent who loses a child finds a way to laugh again. The timbre begins to fade. The edge dulls. The hurt lessens. Every love is carved from loss. Mine was. Yours is. Yor great-great-great-grandchildren's will be. But we learn to live in that love

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

All that mattered was him looking at me

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

It's nice to believe that when confronted with facts people will just suddenly respond to them but, in fact, most people don't really work like that.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

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

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

If we are not given the option to live without violence, we are given the choice to center our meals around harvest or slaughter, husbandry or war. We have chosen slaughter. We have chosen war. That's the truest version of our story of eating animals.Can we tell a new story?

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Kids are a great analogy. You want your kids to grow up, and you don't want your kids to grow up. You want your kids to become independent of you, but it's also a parent's worst nightmare: That they won't need you. It's like the real tragedy of parenting.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

I'm less worried about accomplishment - as younger people always can't help but be - and more concerned with spending my time well, spending time with my family, and reading, learning things.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Food is not rational. Food is culture, habit, craving and identity.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Food is not just what we put in our mouths to fill up; it is culture and identity. Reason plays some role in our decisions about food, but it's rarely driving the car.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer