Top 500 Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “One of the greatest opportunities to live our values-or betray them-lies in the food we put on our plates.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

152. “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.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

153. “We talked about nothing in particular, but it felt like we were talking about the most important things...”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

154. “Feathers filled the small room. Our laughter kept the feathers in the air. I thought about birds. Could they fly is there wasn’t someone, somewhere, laughing?”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

155. “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 would never have war anymore.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

156. “I tried the key in all the doors, even though he said he didn’t recognize it. It’s not that I didn’t trust him, becuase I did. It’s that at the end of my search I wanted to be able to say: I don’t know how I could have tried harder.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

157. “Without context, we’d all be monsters.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

158. “I used to think that humor was the only way to appreciate how wonderful and terrible the world is, to celebrate how big life is. But now I think the opposite. Humor is a way of shrinking from that wonderful and terrible world.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

159. “But it was unnecessary. There would be other nights. And how can you say I love you to someone you love? I rolled on my side and fell asleep next to her. Here is the point of everything I’ve been trying to tell you, Oskar. It’s always necessary. I love you, Grandma.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

160. “Memory was supposed to fill the time, but it made time a hole to be filled.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

161. “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

162. “I try not to remember the life that I didn’t want to lose but lost and have to remember.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

163. “The paper, the stapler, the staples, the tape. It makes me sick. Physical things. Forty years of loving someone becomes staples and tape.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

164. “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

165. “I felt, that night, on that stage, under that skull, incredibly close to everything in the universe, but also extremely alone.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

166. “If we were to one day encounter a form of life more powerful and intelligent than our own, and it regarded us as we regard fish, what would be our argument against being eaten?”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

167. “I write because I want to end my loneliness. Books make people less alone. That, before and after everything else, is what books do. They show us that conversations are possible across distances.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

168. “And here I am, instead of there. I’m sitting in this library, thousands of miles from my life, writing another letter I know I won’t be able to send, no matter how hard I try and how much I want to. How did that boy making love behind that shed become this man writing this letter at this table?”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

169. “Let love write on you for awhile.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

170. “I desperately wish I had my tambourine with me now, because even after everything I’m still wearing heavy boots, and sometimes it helps to play a good beat.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

171. “I couldn’t explain to her that I missed him more, more than she or anyone else missed him, because I could’t tell her about what happened with the phone. That secret was a hole in the middle of me that every happy thing fell into.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

172. “We need much bigger pockets I thought as I lay in my bed counting off the seven minutes that it takes a normal person to fall asleep. We need enormous pockets pockets big enough for our families and our friends and even the people who aren’t on our lists people we’ve never met but still want to protect. We need pockets for borough and for cities a pocket that could hold the universe.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

173. “I was of the opinion that the past is past, and like all that is not now it should remain buried along the side of our memories.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

174. “Sometimes people who seem good end up being not as good as you might have hoped, you know?”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

175. “Why is taste, the crudest of our senses, exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other senses?”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

176. “Choosing to eat fewer animal products is probably the most important action an individual can take to reverse global warming – it has a known and significant effect on the environment, and, done collectively, would push the culture and the marketplace with more force than any march.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

177. “The French, who love their dogs, sometimes eat their horses. The Spanish, who love their horses, sometimes eat their cows. The Indians, who love their cows, sometimes eat their dogs.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

178. “Consumers are going to have get used to eating less meat – to paying more for better quality meat and eating significantly less of it.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

179. “I know you look both ways before you cross the street, but I want you to look both ways a second time, because I told you to.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

180. “Just because you’re an atheist, that doesn’t mean you wouldn’t love for things to have reasons for why they are.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

181. “Is there really anyone, besides Rudy Giuliani, who prefers the new Times Square?”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

182. “Humans are the only animal that blushes, laughs, has religion, wages war, and kisses with lips. So in a way, the more you kiss with lips, the more human you are. And the more you wage war.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

183. “She was a genius of sadness, immersing herself in it, separating its numerous strands, appreciating its subtle nuances. She was a prism through which sadness could be divided into its infinite spectrum.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

184. “I never confused what I had with what I was.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

185. “It’s so beautiful at this hour. The sun is low, the shadows are long, the air is cold and clean. You won’t be awake for another five hours, but I can’t help feeling that we’re sharing this clear and beautiful morning.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

186. “What were we spending so much time doing if not getting to know each other?”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

187. “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

188. “Each day has been chained to the previous one. But the weeks have wings. Anyone who believes that a second is faster than a decade did not live my life.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

189. “You’re entirely capable of doing things you aren’t moved to do and refraining from things that you want to do. That doesn’t make you Gandhi. It makes you an adult.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

190. “Imagine being served a plate of sushi. But this plate also holds all of the animals that were killed for your serving of sushi. The plate might have to be five feet across.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

191. “I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others – The only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

192. “Things were happening around us, but nothing was happening between us.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

193. “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

194. “I was more alone than if I had been alone.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

195. “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

196. “Kein briere iz oich a breire. Not to have a choice is also a choice. How will we tell the story of he who never had no choice? At stake is our notion of righteousness, of a life worth saving.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

197. “Writing’s funny, it’s like walking down a hall in the dark looking for the light switch, and suddenly you find it, flip it on, and then you discover the hallway you passed through is papered with the novel you’ve written.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

198. “Isn’t it so weird how the number of dead people is increasing even though the Earth stays the same size, so that one day there isn’t going to be room to bury anyone anymore?”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

199. “People around the world were moving from one place to another. No one was staying.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

200. “Because it was starting to get dark, and because the streets were crowded, I bumped into a googolplex people. Who were they? Where were they going? What were they looking for? I wanted to hear their heartbeats, and I wanted them to hear mine.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer