Top 500 Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “The philosopher Elaine Scarry has observed that “beauty always takes place in the particular.” Cruelty, on the other hand, prefers abstraction.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer

305. “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

306. “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

307. “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

308. “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

309. “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

310. “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

311. “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

312. “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

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer

319. “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

320. “I said, ‘I need to know how he died.’ He flipped back and pointed at, ‘Why?’ So I can stop inventing how he died. I’m always inventing.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

321. “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

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer

323. “Sometimes one simply wants to disappear.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

324. “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

325. “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

326. “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

327. “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

328. “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

Featured in: Country Quotes

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer

330. “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

331. “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

332. “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

333. “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

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer

335. “Look, taste is clearly the crudest of our senses: this is scientifically, objectively factual. It is less nuanced. Eyesight is extraordinary – hearing, touch. I find people who devote their whole lives to taste a little strange.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

336. “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

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer

339. “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

340. “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

341. “One weird thing is, I wonder if everyone’s hearts would start to beat at the same time, like how women who live together have their menstrual periods at the same time, which I know about, but don’t really want to know about.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer

345. “We cannot keep the kinds of meals we have known and also keep the planet we have known. We must either let some eating habits go or let the planet go. It is that straightforward, that fraught.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

346. “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

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer

349. “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

350. “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