Top 500 Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Years were passing through the spaces between moments.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

102. “There are only so many times that you can utter ‘It does not hurt’ before it begins to hurt even more than the hurt. You become enlightened of the feeling of feeling hurt, which is worse, I am certain, than the existent hurt.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

103. “She laughed enough to migrate an entire flock of birds. That was how she said yes.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

104. “He knew that I love you also means I love you in a way that no one loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that I love no one else, and never have loved anyone else, and never will love anyone else.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

105. “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

106. “The mistakes I’ve made are dead to me. But I can’t take back the things I never did.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

107. “I hope you never think about anything as much as I think about you.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

108. “My life story is the story of everyone I’ve ever met.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

109. “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.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

110. “She was so beautiful, like someone who you will never meet, but always dream of meeting, like someone who is too good for you.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

111. “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.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

112. “The only way to overcome sadness is to consume it.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

113. “The sky slowly pulled up its blue dress to reveal night.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

114. “You are the only one who has understood even a whisper of me, and I will tell you that I am the only person who has understood even a whisper of you.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

115. “Nothing is beautiful and true.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

116. “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.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

117. “And also, there are so many times when you need to make a quick escape, but humans don’t have their own wings, or not yet, anyway, so what about a birdseed shirt?”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

118. “Books are slow, books are quiet. The Internet is fast and loud.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

119. “He promised us that everything would be okay. I was a child, but I knew that everything would not be okay. That did not make my father a liar. It made him my father.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

120. “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

121. “I hated myself for going, why couldn’t I be the kind of person who stays?”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

122. “I don’t think that there are any limits to how excellent we could make life seem.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

123. “Being with him made my brain quiet. I didn’t have to invent a thing.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

124. “There’s nothing wrong with not understanding yourself.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

125. “The more you love someone, he came to think, the harder it is to tell them. It surprised him that strangers didn’t stop each other on the street to say I love you.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

126. “I will describe my eyes and then begin the story. My eyes are blue and resplendent. Now I will begin the story.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

127. “She let out a laugh, and then she put her hand over her mouth, like she was angry at herself for forgetting her sadness.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

128. “But I still couldn’t figure out what it all meant. The more I found out, the less I understood.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

129. “As long as I am thinking, I am alive.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

130. “I put my hand on the doorknob because I thought maybe her hand was on the doorknob on the other side.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer

132. “It was terrible. All of the things we couldn’t share. The room was filled with conversations we weren’t having.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

133. “I shook my tambourine the whole time, because it helped me remember that even though I was going through different neighborhoods, I was still me.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

134. “She had fallen in love so many times that she began to suspect she was not falling in love at all, but doing something much more ordinary.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

135. “If the thrill of hunting were in the hunt, or even in the marksmanship, a camera would do just as well.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

136. “Why does watching a dog be a dog fill one with happiness?”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer

138. “There’s a Hasidic proverb: ‘While we pursue happiness, we flee from contentment.’” Jacob.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

139. “I zipped myself all the way into the sleeping bag of myself, not because I was hurt, and not because I had broken something, but because they were cracking up.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

140. “I wanted to touch him, to tell him that even if everyone left everyone, I would never leave him, he talked and talked, his words fell through him, trying to find the floor to his sadness.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

141. “I have no need for the past, I thought, like a child. I did not consider that the past might have a need for me.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

142. “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.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

143. “Ninety-nine percent of all land animals eaten or used to produce milk and eggs in the United States are factory farmed. So although there are important exceptions, to speak about eating animals today is to speak about factory farming.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

144. “People who become used to saying little become used to feeling little.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

145. “If nothing matters, there’s nothing to save.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

146. “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

147. “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?”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

148. “I thought for a minute, and then I got heavy, heavy boots.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

149. “If I’d been someone else in a different world I’d’ve done something different, but I was myself and the world was the world, so I was silent.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

150. “I got incredibly heavy boots about how relatively insignificant life is, and how, compared to the universe and compared to time, it didn’t even matter if I existed at all.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer