Top 500 Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “She repeats things until they are true, or until she can’t tell whether they are true or not. She has become an expert at confusing what is with what was with what should be with what could be.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

302. “What is being awake if not interpreting our dreams, or dreaming if not interpreting our wake?”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

303. “They reciprocated the great and saving lie – that our love for things is greater than our lover for our love for things – willfully playing the parts they wrote for themselves, willfully creating and believing fictions necessary for life.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

304. “It is dangerous to pretend that we know more than we do. But it is even more dangerous to pretend that we know less.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

305. “It was getting hard to keep all the things I didn’t know inside me.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

306. “If we don’t demonstrate solidarity through small collective sacrifices, we will not win the war, and if we do not win the war, we will lose the childhood home of every human who has ever lived.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

307. “I’m not better than anyone, and I’m not trying to convince people to live by my standards of what’s right. I’m trying to convince them to live by their own.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

308. “She wanted nothing more than someone to miss, to touch, with whom to speak like a child, with whom to be a child.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

309. “I will walk without noise and I will open the door in darkness and I will.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

310. “I observe, I write, I try not to remember the life that I didn’t want to loose but lost and have to remember, being here fills my heart with so much joy, even if the joy isn’t mine, and at the end of the day I fill the suitcase with old news.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

311. “The wanting, the needing, the distance, the disappointment: growing, knowing, committing, aging beside another. Alone, one can live perfectly. But not a life.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

312. “We eat as sons and daughters, as families, as communities, as generations, as nations, and increasingly as a globe. We can’t stop our eating from radiating influence even if we want to.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

313. “There was nothing, which would have been unfortunate, unless nothing was a clue. Was nothing a clue?”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

314. “I’d experienced joy, but not nearly enough, could there be enough? The end of suffering does not justify the suffering, and so there is no end to 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

315. “It can be challenge enough to have to eat with myself.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

316. “She saw through the shell of me into the center of me.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

317. “And the joys I’ve felt have not always been joyous. I could have lived differently. When I was your age, my grandfather bought me a ruby bracelet. It as too big for me an would slide up and down my arm. It was almost a necklace. He later told me that he had asked the jeweler make that way. Its size was supposed to be a symbol of his love. More rubies, more love. But I could not wear it comfortably. I could not wear it at all. So here is the point of everything I have been trying to say. IF I were to give a bracelet to you, now, I would measure your wrist twice.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

318. “Their relationship was defined not by what they could share, but what they couldn’t. 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

319. “Everything is to protect you. I exist in case you need to be protected.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

320. “We aren’t exactly emptying the oceans; it’s more like clear-cutting a forest with thousands of species to create massive fields with one type of soybean.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

321. “Profound, bottomless self-doubt – it has no value – what’s the point? In a way, it takes up as much time as anything else.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

322. “I wish my days could be washed away like the chalk lines of my days.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

323. “I regret how much I believed in the future.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

324. “Be the instrument playing the sound of your life’s passing.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

325. “Mi s-a parut foarte emotionant sa-i simt atingerea si sa-mi amintesc ca mainile pot exprima si iubire.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

326. “He was someone whom everyone admired and liked but whom nobody knew. He was like a book that you could feel good holding, that you could talk about without ever having read, that you could recommend.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

327. “Words are capable of making experience more vivid, and also of organizing it. They can scare us, and they can comfort us.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

328. “I felt it very moving to feel his touch, and to remember that hands can also show love.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

329. “I ran rather than walked, anxious to lose my way. All I wanted was to be unsure.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

330. “Oh, I’d say I like a meal as much as anybody. But I find a certain kind of foodiness silly, gluttonous and embarrassing.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

331. “In my family, Father is the world champion at ending conversations.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

332. “Every widow wakes one morning, perhaps after years of pure and unwavering grieving, to realize she slept a good night’s sleep, and will be able to eat breakfast, and doesn’t hear her husband’s ghost all the time, but only some of the time. Her grief is replaced with a useful sadness. Every parent who loses a child finds a way to laugh again. The timbre begins to fade. The edge dulls. The hurt lessens. Every love is carved from loss. Mine was. Yours is. Your great-great-great-grandchildren’s will be. But we learn to live in that love.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

333. “Sadness of love without release.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

334. “But what she was really trying to say was this: I like music better than anything in the world, after you.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

335. “The animals are those things that God likes but doesn’t love.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

336. “We talked for hours, but we just kept repeating those same things over and over and over.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

337. “Literature was the only religion her father practiced, when a book fell on the floor he kissed it, when he was done with a book he tried to give it away to someone who would love it.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

338. “Our love was the affliction for which only our love was the cure.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

339. “As I’ve grown older, I’ve grown more convinced there’s nothing that shouldn’t be talked about. If we think we’re protecting each other, we’re not.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

340. “Why do I write? It’s not that I want people to think I am smart, or even that I am a good writer. I write because I want to end my loneliness.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

341. “We shared the smile of recognizing ourselves in each other.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

342. “I flipped back through the pad of paper while I thought about what Stephen Hawking would do next.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

343. “Choosing leaf or flesh, factory farm or family farm, does not in itself change the world, but teaching ourselves, our children, our local communities, and our nation to choose conscience over ease can.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

344. “Mom said, “His spirit is there,” and that made me really angry. I told her, “Dad didn’t have a spirit! He had cells!” “His memory is there.” “His memory is here,” I said, pointing at my head. “Dad had a spirit,” she said, like she was rewinding a bit in our conversation. I told her, “He had cells, and now they’re on rooftops, and in the river, and in the lungs of millions of people around New York, who breathe him every time they speak!”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

345. “Jacob was right when, after Sam’s injury, he said it was too much love for happiness.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

346. “I didn’t intend to write about totems or people searching. I tried not to constrain myself, and this is what I ended up with. There’s this great Auden quote: “I look at what I write so I can see what I think.””

— Jonathan Safran Foer

347. “Before child labor laws, there were businesses that treated their ten-year-old employees well. society didn’t ban child labor because it’s impossible to imagine children working in a good environment, but because when you give that much power to businesses over powerless individuals, it’s corrupting. When we walk around thinking we have a greater right to eat an animal than the animal has a right to live without suffering, it’s corrupting.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

348. “I wasn’t trying to invent better and better homes, but to show her that homes didn’t matter, we could live in any home, in any city, in any country, in any century, and be happy, as if the world were just what we lived in.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

349. “Every night before putting her to sleep, Yankel counts her ribs, as if one might have disappeared in the course of the day and become the seed and soil for some new companion to steal her away from him.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

350. “The difference between conceding and accepting is depression.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer