Top 500 Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 5 of 10

201. “I tried to think about other things. I tried to invent optimistic inventions. But the pessimistic ones were extremely loud.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

202. “The images of his infinite pasts and infinite futures washed over him as he waited, paralyzed, in the present.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

203. “Between any two beings there is a unique, uncrossable distance, an unenterable sanctuary. Sometimes it takes the shape of aloneness. Sometimes it takes the shape of love.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

204. “I saw Herschel and he saw me and we stood next to each other because that is what friends do in the presence of evil or love.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

205. “This is my heart. You are touching it with your left hand. You are touching it with your left hand, not because you are left-handed, although you might be, but because I am holding it against my heart. What you are feeling is the beating of my heart. It is what keeps me alive.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

206. “It made me start to wonder if there were other people so lonely so close. I thought about “Eleanor Rigby.” It’s true, where do they all come from? And where do they all belong?”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

207. “And you can’t force someone to believe, not even with better and louder and more virtuous arguments, not even with irrefutable evidence.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

208. “Sadness and joy aren’t opposites of each other. They are each the opposite of indifference.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

209. “Memory was supposed to fill the time, but it made time a hole to be filled. Each second was two hundred yards, to be walked, crawled. You couldn’t see the next hour, it was so far in the distance. Tomorrow was over the horizon, and would take an entire day to reach.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

210. “Factory farmers talk about their desire to feed the world. That’s not what they’re doing. They’re feeding the world with really, really cheap stuff.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

211. “The Eskimos have four hundred words for snow, and the Jewshave four hundred for schmuck.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

212. “Instead of singing in the shower, I would write out the lyrics of my favourite songs, the ink would turn the water blue or red or green, and the music would run down my legs.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

213. “I felt suddenly shy. I was not used to shy. I was used to shame. 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

214. “In the morning, when the nothing vase casts a something shadow, like the memory of someone you’ve lost, what can you say about that?”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

215. “Cruelty depends on an understanding of cruelty, and the ability to choose against it. Or to choose to ignore it.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

216. “Shyness is when you turn your head away from something you want.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

217. “I’d lost count of the disappointments.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

218. “The only thing worse than being sad is for others to know you are sad.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

219. “Memories are small prayers to God, if we believed in that sort of thing.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

220. “We spent our lives making livings.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

221. “We can choose to make changes, or we can be subject to other changes – mass migration, disease, armed conflict, a greatly diminished quality of life – but there is no future without change. The luxury of choosing which changes we prefer has an expiration date.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

222. “I’m not funny. People assume that because my books are funny, I’ll be funny in real life. It’s the inevitable disappointment of meeting me.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

223. “There are still many different ways to get stuck, existentially stuck. Feeling like, “This is worthless. I’m wasting my time, and I would be wasting the time of someone who tried to read this.” It happens all the time.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

224. “A few weeks after the worst day, I started writing lots of letters. I don’t know why, but it was one of the only things that made my boots lighter.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

225. “Factory farming, of course, does not cause all the world’s problems, but is is remarkable just how many of them intersect there.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

226. “But unlike all farmed meat, which requires the creation and maintenance of animals, dogs are practically begging to be eaten. Three to four million dogs and cats are euthanized annually. This amounts to millions of pounds of meat now being thrown away every year.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

227. “Life was a small negative space cut out of the eternal solidity, and for the first time, it felt precious – not like all of the words that had come to mean nothing, but like the last breath of a drowning victim.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

228. “What if I never stop inventing?”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

229. “Living on a planet of fixed size requires compromise, and while we are the only party capable of negotiating, we are not the only party at the table. We’ve never claimed more, and we’ve never had less.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

230. “I don’t mind if smiles come at my expense, I’m a small price to pay.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

231. “You can make great meals without meat that are, of course, much more healthy for the same price, but it takes a process of reeducation, just because Americans aren’t familiar with how to cook vegetables anymore.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

232. “Hunting will never feed lots of people; it will always be a hobby.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

233. “Nine out of ten significant people have to do with money or war!”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

234. “I thought about all of the things that everyone ever says to each other, and how everyone is going to die, whether it’s in a millisecond, or days, or months, or 76.5 years, if you were just born. Everything that’s born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they’re all on fire, and we’re all trapped.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

235. “Being reliable is something. Being good.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

236. “Raising your kids vegetarian is a great way to encourage them to do the opposite of what you want! But the goal is not to have them have the same values that I have. It’s to have them act on their values.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer

238. “Sometimes I imagined stitching all of our little touches together. How many hundreds of thousands of fingers brushing against each other does it take to make love? Why does anyone ever make love?”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

239. “Your dad didn’t die, so I won’t be able to explain it to you.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

240. “Everyone is always in need of something that another person can give, be it undivided attention, a kind word or deep empathy. There is no better use of a life than to be attentive to such needs.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

241. “Sometimes I can feel my bones straining.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

242. “I wanted to protect him, which I was sure I could do, even if I could not protect myself.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

243. “It’s much easier to be cruel than one might think.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

244. “I’ve thought myself out of happinessone one million times, but never once into it.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

245. “Stories about food are stories about us-our history and our values.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

246. “I kept thinking how they were all names of dead people, and how names are basically the only thing dead people keep.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

247. “She wanted more, more slang, more figures of speech, the bee’s knees, the cats pajamas, horse of a different color, dog-tired, she wanted to talk like she was born here, like she never came from anywhere else.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

248. “Anyway, the fascinating thing was that I read in National Geographic that there are more people alive now than have died in all of human history. In other words, if everyone wanted to play Hamlet at once, they couldn’t, because there aren’t enough skulls!”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

249. “The Gypsy girl carved love letters into trees, filling the forest with notes for him.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

250. “I wasn’t having second thoughts, but I was having thoughts.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer