Top 500 Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “We’ve made science experiments of ourselves and our children.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

252. “We shared the smile of recognizing ourselves in each other, how many imposters do I have? Do we all make the same mistakes, or has one of us gotten it right, or even just a bit less wrong, am I the imposter?”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

253. “I wondered, for the first time in my life, if life was worth all the work it took to live. What exactly made it worth it?”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

254. “Family are the people who must make you feel ashamed when you are deserving of shame.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

255. “Also, I designed a pretty fascinating bracelet, where you put a rubber band around your favorite book of poems for a year, and then you take it off and wear it.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

256. “She was with me. She did all of those things and so many more, things I would never tell anyone, and she never even loved me. Now that’s love.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

257. “Changing how we eat will not be enough, on its own, to save the planet, but we cannot save the planet without changing how we eat.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

258. “I started carrying blank books like this one around, which I would fill with all the things I couldn’t say...”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

259. “If people thought about food more like how we think about the environment, a lot of people would be eating differently and the whole system would look a lot different.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

260. “I would have done anything for him. Maybe that was my sickness.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

261. “What kind of world would we create if three times a day we activated our compassion and reason as we sat down to eat, if we had the moral imagination and the pragmatic will to change our most fundamental act of consumption?”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

262. “But I dig Negroes. I dig them all the way.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

263. “Something having been done just about everywhere just about always is no kind of justification for doing it now.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

264. “Fiction works when it makes a reader feel something strongly.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

265. “I always write out of a need to read something, rather than a need to write something.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

266. “But I knew the truth and that’s why I was so sad. Every moment before this one depends on this one. Everything in the history of the world can be proven wrong in one moment.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

267. “I used to be an atheist, which means I didn’t believe in things that couldn’t be observed. I believed that once you’re dead, you’re dead forever, and you don’t feel anything, and you don’t even dream. It’s not that I believe in things that can’t be observed now, because I don’t. It’s that I believe that things are extremely complicated.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

268. “Books are for those without real lives, he thought. And they are no real replacement.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

269. “Everything is the way it is because everything was the way it was. Sometimes I feel ensnared in this, as if no matter what I do, what will come has already been fixed.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

270. “My boots were so heavy that I was glad there was a column beneath us. How could such a lonely person have been living so close to me my whole life? If I had known, I would have gone up to keep him company.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

271. “Reality Hunger is more than thought-provoking; it’s one of the most beautiful books I’ve read in a long time.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

272. “I’ve never particularly liked bankers.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

273. “I’m interested in the kind of religion that makes life harder. I’m not so interested in the comforting kind of religion.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

274. “As a writer, putting words on the page is how I pay attention.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

275. “He Wrote, Are you OK? I told him, My eyes are crummy. He wrote, But are you OK? I told him, That’s a very complicated question. He wrote, That’s a very simple answer. I asked, Are you OK? He wrote, Some mornings I wake up feeling grateful.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

276. “Because they were young. Because one is young only once in a life lived only once. Because recklessness is the only fist to throw at nothingness. How much aliveness can one bear?”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

277. “We could imagine all sorts of universes unlike this one, but this is the one that happened.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

278. “You can call your turkey organic and torture it daily.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

279. “I know lots and lots and lots of vegetarians who think it’s perfectly all right to kill animals for food to eat, but don’t do it because they think all the ways in which it’s done are wrong.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

280. “Few people sufficiently appreciate the colossal task of feeding a world of billions of omnivores who demand meat with their potatoes.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

281. “We can’t plead ignorance, only indifference. Those alive today are the generations that came to know better. We have the burden and the opportunity of living in the moment when the critique of factory farming broke into the popular consciousness. We are the ones of whom it will be fairly asked, What did you do when you learned the truth about eating animals?”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

282. “We are not long-term beings. Not heroes of romances in many volumes. For one gesture, for one word alone, we shall make the effort. We openly admit: our creations will be temporary. We shall have this as our aim: a gesture.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

283. “It’s rarely talked about, but hunting for sport is just about as vile as we humans get.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

284. “I love the idea of books being more than books, or being, rather, something other than books.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

285. “Maybe I’ll try to be more patient with morons.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

286. “I have an aristocratic smile and like to punch people.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

287. “We are lying to ourselves and to each other. Lying about what? I don’t care if we’re lying. I am a bad person. I don’t care. I don’t care what you are.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

288. “I want to talk about God in a literary way. But I think I would have a very hard time praying to God.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

289. “My wife and I have chosen to bring up our children as vegetarians. In another time or place, we might have made a different decision. But the realities of our present moment compelled us to make that choice.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

290. “It would be possible, in theory, for life and art to be reversed.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

291. “In sickness and in sickness. That is what I wish for you. Don’t seek or expect miracles. There are no miracles. Not anymore. And there are no cures for the hurt that hurts most. There is only the medicine of believing each other’s pain, and being present for it.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

292. “The philosopher Elaine Scarry has observed that “beauty always takes place in the particular.” Cruelty, on the other hand, prefers abstraction.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

293. “Sometimes one simply wants to disappear.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

294. “Let’s go to bed. Those four words differentiate a marriage from every other kind of relationship. We aren’t going to find a way to agree, but let’s go to bed. Not because we want to, but because we have to. We hate each other right now, but let’s go to bed. It’s the only one we have. Let’s go to our sides, but the sides of the same bed. Let’s retreat into ourselves, but together. How many conversations had ended with those four words? How many fights?”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

295. “I first became a vegetarian when I was nine, in response to an argument made by a radical babysitter. My great change – which lasted a couple of weeks – was based on the very simple instinct that it’s wrong to kill animals for food.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

296. “But come. No explaining or mending. Be beside me somewhere.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

297. “Isn’t it strange how upset people get about a few dozen baseball players taking growth hormones, when we’re doing what were doing to our food animals and feeding them to our children?”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

298. “Food for her is not food, it is terror, dignity, gratitude, vengeance, joyfulness, humiliation, religion, history, and, of course, love. As if the fruit she always offered us were picked from the destroyed brances of out family tree.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

299. “They do not desire anything more than everything they have known.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

300. “My dream went all the way back to the beginning. The rain rose into the clouds, and the animals descended the ramp.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer