Top 500 Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

353. “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

354. “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

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer

356. “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

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer

360. “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

361. “We live in a world in which it’s conventional to treat an animal like a hunk of wood and extreme to treat an animal like an animal.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

362. “I can’t live, I’ve tried and I can’t. If that sounds simple, it’s simple like a mountain is simple.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

363. “Wolf Blitzer had once again relieved the horrible tension of his purgatorial beard – neither a beard nor not a beard – with yet another new pair of glasses.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

364. “Every time you make a decision about food, Paul pleaded, quoting Berry, “you are farming by proxy.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

365. “Try to live so that you can always tell the truth.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

366. “These little daily choices that we’re so used to thinking are irrelevant are the most important thing we do all day long.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

367. “We believed in our grandmother’s cooking more fervently than we believed in God.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

368. “For how long could we fail until we surrendered?”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

369. “But I knew that there couldn’t be pockets that enormous. In the end, everyone loses everyone. There was no invention to get around that, and so I felt, that night, like the turtle that everything else in the universe was on top of.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

370. “What does it remember like?”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

371. “Nothing goes away. Not on its own. You deal with it, or it deals with you.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

372. “Golda Meir had told Anwar Sadat: “We can forgive you for killing our children, but we will never forgive you for making us kill yours.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

373. “Only humans can cry tears.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

374. “We believe that the environmental crisis is caused by large outside forces and therefore can be solved only by large outside forces. But recognizing that we are responsible for the problem is the beginning of taking responsibility for the solution.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

375. “It was the feeling of not wanting to live in the world, even if it was the only place to live.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

376. “She maintained a careful balance by her window, never allowing the men to come too close, never allowing them to stray too far.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

377. “That’s all anyone wants from anyone else, not love itself but the knowledge that love is there.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

378. “The room was filled with conversations we weren’t having.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

379. “One can build a perfect home, but not live in it.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

380. “The writing itself is no big deal. The editing, and even more than that, the self-doubt, is excruciatingly impossible.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

381. “I dreamt four nights ago of clock hands descending from the universe like rain, of the moon as a green eye, of mirrors and insects, of a love that never withdrew. It was not the feeling of completeness that I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

382. “Do you eat chicken because you are familiar with the scientific literature on them and have decided that their suffering doesn’t matter, or do you do it because it tastes good?”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

383. “The four highest-impact things an individual can do to tackle climate change are eat a plant-based diet, avoid air travel, live car-free, and have fewer children. Of those four actions, only plant-based eating immediately addresses methane and nitrous oxide, the most urgently important greenhouse gases.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

384. “I watched the sheets breathe when she breathed, like how Dad used to say that trees inhale when people exhale, because I was too young to understand the truth about biological processes.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

385. “I have made efforts to make you appear as a person with less anxiety, as you have commanded me to do on so many occasions. This is difficult to achieve, because in truth you are a person with very much anxiety. Perhaps you should be a drug user.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

386. “Writers now are putting total faith in designers at Apple and Amazon. It’s almost like a race-car driver having no input into how cars are designed.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

387. “Then I have some bad news for you, because humans are going to destroy each other as soon as it becomes easy enough to, which will be very soon.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

388. “Yesterday I wanted to turn inside out.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

389. “All happy mornings resemble one another, as do all unhappy mornings, and that’s at the bottom of what makes them so deeply unhappy: the feeling that this unhappiness has happened before, that efforts to avoid it will at best reinforce it, and probably even exacerbate it, that the universe is, for whatever inconceivable, unnecessary, and unjust reason, conspiring against the innocent sequence of clothes, breakfast, teeth and egregious cowlicks, backpacks, shoes, jackets, goodbye. Jacob.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

390. “We looked at each other until it felt like everything would burst into flames.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

391. “I could tell that Mom was dreaming, but I didn’t want to know what she was dreaming about, because I had enough of my own nightmares, and if she had been dreaming something happy, I would have been angry at her for dreaming something happy.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

392. “When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

393. “Everything is the way it is because everything was the way it was.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

394. “It’s true, I am afraid of dying. I am afraid of the world moving forward without me, of my absence going unnoticed, or worse, being some natural force propelling life on. Is it selfish? Am I such a bad person for dreaming of a world that ends when I do?”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

395. “There is nothing wrong with compromising. Even if you compromise almost everything.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

396. “My test for writing is always, is this fun or does it feel like a job? Is it moving me? Or am I just fulfilling my own expectations – or even worse, somebody else’s?”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

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397. “It is better to lose than never to have had.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

398. “There are more places you haven’t heard of then you’re heard of!′ I loved that.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

399. “Nobody wants to be a caricature. Nobody wants to be a diminished version of herself.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

400. “Ironically, the utterly unselective omnivore – “I’m easy; I’ll eat anything” – can appear more socially sensitive than the individual who tries to eat in a way that is good for society.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer