Top 500 Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

Featured in: Happiness Quotes, Emotional Quotes, Life Lessons Quotes, Sad Quotes, Sorrow Quotes

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer

Featured in: Identity Quotes, Sad Quotes

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer

Featured in: Missing Someone Quotes

4. “Not responding is a response – we are equally responsible for what we don’t do.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

5. “I think and think and think, I’ve thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

6. “Why didn’t I learn to treat everything like it was the last time. My greatest regret was how much I believed in the future.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

Featured in: Sad Quotes About Life, Future Quotes, Regret Quotes

7. “Love me, because love doesn’t exist, and I have tried everything that does.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

8. “While it is always possible to wake a person who’s sleeping, no amount of noise will wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

9. “It’s hard to say goodbye to the place you’ve lived. It can be as hard as saying goodbye to a person.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

Featured in: Goodbye Quotes

10. “Food is not rational. Food is culture, habit, craving and identity.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

11. “I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

12. “I’m so afraid of losing something I love that I refuse to love anything.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

13. “I made up my mind that nothing,, nothing was going to stop me Not even me.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

14. “It’s the tragedy of loving, you can’t love anything more than something you miss.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

15. “It was one of the best days of my life, a day during which I lived my life and didn’t think about my life at all.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

16. “I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

17. “The end of suffering does not justify the suffering, and so there is no end to suffering.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer

19. “People hurt each other. That’s what people do.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

20. “Since the world has changed so much, the same values don’t lead to the same choices anymore.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

21. “For a long time, I thought I would like to be a doctor. Such a good profession. So explicitly good. Never a waste of time.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

22. “People who care about animals tend to care about people. They don’t care about animals to the exclusion of people. Caring is not a finite resource and, even more than that, it’s like a muscle: the more you exercise it, the stronger it gets.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

23. “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.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

24. “Animal agriculture makes a 40% greater contribution to global warming than all transportation in the world combined; it is the number one cause of climate change.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

25. “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!”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

26. “Time was passing like a hand waving from a train that I wanted to be on.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

27. “One day you will do things for me that you hate. That is what it means to be family.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

28. “We live in a world made up more of story than stuff. We are creatures of memory more than reminders, of love more than likes.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

29. “This is love, she thought, isn’t it? When you notice someone’s absence and hate that absence more than anything? More, even, than you love his presence?”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer

31. “Life is scarier than death.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer

34. “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

35. “People don’t care enough. They don’t get worked up enough. They don’t get angry enough. They don’t get passionate enough. I’d rather somebody hate what I do than be indifferent to it.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

36. “I am always sad, I think. Perhaps this signifies that I am not sad at all, because sadness is something lower than your normal disposition, and I am always the same thing. Perhaps I am the only person in the world, then, who never becomes sad. Perhaps I am lucky.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

37. “I can forgive you for leaving, but not for coming back.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

38. “I did not need to know if he could love me. I needed to know if he could need me.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

39. “I imagine a line, a white line, painted on the sand and on the ocean, from me to you.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

40. “The secret was a hole in the middle of me that every happy thing fell into.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

41. “In the end, everyone loses everyone. There was no invention to get around that.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

42. “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

43. “She is deranged, but so so playful.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

44. “The factory farm has succeeded by divorcing people from their food, eliminating farmers, and ruling agriculture by corporate fiat.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

45. “Am I such a bad person for dreaming of a world that ends when I do? I don’t mean the world ending with respect to me, but every set of eyes closing with mine.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

46. “Technology celebrates connectedness, but encourages retreat.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer

48. “I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live. Because if I were able to live my life again, I would do things differently. I would change my life.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

49. “Words never mean what we want them to mean.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

50. “I looked at everyone and wondered where they came from, and who they missed, and what they were sorry for.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer