Top 500 Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “Almost always when I told someone I was writing a book about “eating animals”, they assumed, even without knowing anything about my views, that it was a case for vegetarianism. It’s a telling assumption, one that implies not only that a thorough inquiry into animal agriculture would lead one away from eating meat, but that most people already know that to be the case.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

452. “Encoded into our language is the understanding that disasters tend to expose that which was previously hidden. As the planetary crisis unfolds as a series of emergencies, our decisions will reveal who we are.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

453. “I am the one who broke the rule. But I am the one who made the rule you couldn’t live with.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

454. “I have witnessed Grandfather cry, and I implore myself to say that I desire to never witness him cry again. If this signifies that I must do things for him so that he will not cry, then I will do those things. If this signifies that I must not look when he cries, then I will not look.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

455. “To try to live.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

456. “The question, I’ve come to think, is not what inspires one to change, but what inspires one to remain changed.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer

458. “She asked: “What can you promise?” He promised: “Things are about to be different.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

459. “What do babies dream of? She must be dreaming of the before-life, just as I dream of the afterlife.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

460. “But that slip of paper wouldn’t disappear, ever, and neither would the image of his prostrate wife, and neither would the thought that if he could, it might greatly improve his life to end it.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

461. “Once upon a time, USDA inspectors had to condemn any bird with such fecal contamination. But about thirty years ago, the poultry industry convinced the USDA to reclassify feces so that it could continue to use these automatic eviscerators. Once a dangerous contaminant, feces are now classified as a “cosmetic blemish.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

462. “I have made my own choice, which is vegetarianism, but it’s not the choice I’m imposing on anybody else.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

463. “Che rimpianto, pensare che serve una vita per imparare a vivere, Oskar.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

464. “It seems entirely possible to me that horrible things can be going on without us becoming horrible people.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

465. “TV guy and sometimes cooker Gordon Ramsay can get pretty macho with baby animals when doing publicity for something he’s selling, but you’ll never see a puppy peeking out of one of his pots. And though he once said he’d electrocute his children if they became vegetarian, I wonder what his response would be if they poached the family pooch.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

466. “You only get to keep what you refuse to let go of.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

467. “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

468. “Jewish-motherly.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

469. “They learned to hate her unknowability, her untouchability, the collage of her.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

470. “But when, at the end of my sophomore year, I became a philosophy major and started doing my first seriously pretentious thinking, I became a vegetarian again. The kind of willful forgetting that I was sure meat eating required felt too paradoxical to the intellectual life I was trying to shape. I thought life could, should, and must conform to the mold of reason. You can imagine how annoying this made me.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer

472. “It is not a thing that you can imagine. It only is. After that, there can be no imagining.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

473. “Why I’m Not Where You Are.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

474. “I wouldn’t want a boy to think I was pretty unless he was the kind of boy who thought I was pretty.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

475. “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

476. “God loves the plagiarist. And so it is written, ‘God created humankind in His image, in the image of God He created them.” God is the original plagiarizer. With a lack of reasonable sources from which to filch – man created in the image of what? the animals? – the creation of man was an act of reflexive plagiarizing; God looted the mirror. When we plagiarize, we are likewise creating in the image and participating in the completion of Creation.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

477. “Is this why you think you are chosen by God, because only you can understand the funnies that you make about yourself?”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

478. “If god exists, he is not to be believed in.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

479. “I am a mother, she thought – not an answer to the question being asked, and no more her ultimate ambition than happiness, but her ultimate identity.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

480. “It’s a rule that we never listen to sad music, we made that rule early on, songs are as sad as the listener, we hardly ever listen to music.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

481. “The older one gets, the harder it is to account for time. Children ask: “Are we there yet?” Adults: “How did we get here so quickly?”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

482. “I am very simple to enchant.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

483. “At first I thought I’d walked into a tree, but then that tree became a person, who was also recovering on the ground, and then I saw that it was her and she saw that it was me...”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer

485. “And there was shame in being human: the shame of knowing that twenty of the roughly thirty-five classified species of sea horse worldwide are threatened with extinction because they are killed “unintentionally” in seafood production.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

486. “Is God sad? He would have to exist to be sad, wouldn’t He? I know, she said, giving his shoulder a little slap. That’s why I was asking, so I might finally know if you believed! Well, let me leave it at this: if God does exist, He would have a great deal to be sad about. And if He doesn’t exist, then that too would make Him quite sad, I imagine. So to answer your question, God must be sad.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

487. “Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

488. “Blessings are just curses that other people envy.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

489. “Good people don’t make fewer mistakes, they’re just better at apologizing.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

490. “Hold on. Now you’re calling Sam a racist?” “I did not say that, Mr. Bloch.” “You did. You just did. Julia – ” “I don’t remember his exact words.” “I said, ‘Racism has no place here.’” “Racism is what racists express.” “Have you ever lied, Mr. Bloch?” Jacob reflexively searched his jacket pocket yet again for his phone. “I assume that, like everyone who has ever lived, you have told a lie. But that doesn’t make you a liar.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

491. “One hundred years of joy can be erased in one second.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

492. “Life is precious, Jacob thought. The most important of all thoughts, and the most obvious, and the most difficult to remember to have. How different my life would have been if I could have had that thought before I was forced to.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

493. “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

494. “Make us better than we are. Make us good.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

495. “He couldn’t bear to live, but he couldn’t bear to die. He couldn’t bear the thought of he making love to someone else, but neither could he bear the absence of the thought. And as for the note, he couldn’t bear to keep it, but he couldn’t bear to destroy it either.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

496. “I can only hold on to the things I want to lose.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

497. “And nothing inspires as much shame as being a parent. Children confront us with our paradoxes and hypocrisies, and we are exposed. You need to find an answer for every why – Why do we do this? Why don’t we do that? – and often there isn’t a good one. So you say, simply, because. Or you tell a story that you know isn’t true. And whether or not your face reddens, you blush. The shame of parenthood – which is a good shame – is that we want our children to be more whole than we are, to have satisfactory answers.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

498. “Parents don’t have the luxury of being reasonable, not any more than a religious person does. What can make religious people and parents so utterly insufferable is also what makes religion and Parenthood so utterly beautiful: the All or nothing wager. The Faith.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

499. “He was caught somewhere between his mother’s last kiss and the first kiss he would give his child, between the war that was and would be.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

500. “In the struggle between yourself and the world, side with the world.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer