Top 500 Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “In my family, Father is the world champion at ending conversations.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

352. “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

353. “What does it remember like?”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer

357. “She brushed her eyelashes against his chest.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

358. “If it had and answer, it wouldn’t really be love, would it?”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

359. “If we communicated with something like music, we would never be misunderstood, because there is nothing in music to understand.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

360. “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

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer

363. “Sadness of love without release.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer

365. “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

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer

367. “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

368. “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

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer

370. “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

371. “Only humans can cry tears.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer

373. “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

374. “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

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer

377. “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

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer

379. “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

380. “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

381. “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

382. “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

383. “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

384. “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

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer

387. “She was a prism through with sadness could be divided into its infinite spectrum.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

388. “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

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer

391. “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

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer

393. “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

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer

396. “Food ethics are so complex because food is bound to both taste buds and taste, to individual biographies and social histories.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer

398. “I thought about packing my bags, I thought about jumping out a window, I sat on the bed and thought, I thought about you. What kind of food did you life, what was your favorite song, who was the first girl you kissed, and where, and how, I’m running out of room, I want an infinitely long blank book and forever.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer

400. “How did her life live itself without her.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer