Top 500 Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “There are more places you haven’t heard of then you’re heard of!′ I loved that.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer

403. “I believed him. I was not stupid. I was his wife.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer

405. “It took me as long as I had known him to get rid of all of his words. Like turning an hourglass over.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

406. “It would be refreshing to have a politician try to defend guns without any reference to the Second Amendment, but on the merits of guns.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer

408. “I’m less worried about accomplishment – as younger people always can’t help but be – and more concerned with spending my time well, spending time with my family, and reading, learning things.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

409. “Like you, I think of myself as many things, as if the thinking made it so. In the meantime, while I think – while you think, while we think – our actions and inactions create and destroy the world.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

410. “I invented a book that listed every word in every language. It wouldn’t be a very useful book, but you could hold it and know that everything you could possibly say was in your hands.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

411. “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

412. “He removed several pages of death certificates, which were picked up by another breeze and sent into the trees. Some would fall with the leaves that September. Some would fall with the trees generations later.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

413. “The books could be completely worthless, and things we don’t even read now could be considered the most important books.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

414. “To remember my values, I need to lose certain tastes and find other handles for the memories that they once helped me carry.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

415. “Rabbi, I feel no despair anymore. For seventy years I had only nightmares, but I have no nightmares anymore. I feel only gratitude for my life, for every moment I lived. Not only the good moments. I feel gratitude for every moment of my life. I have seen so many miracles.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

416. “There is a glaring reason that the necessary total ban on nontherapeutic use of antibiotics hasn’t happened: The factory farm industry, allied with the pharmaceutical industry, has more power than public-health professionals.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

417. “Not to have a choice is also a choice.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

418. “In the emptiness of evenings, serious and unequivocal, he would say: “How beautiful is forgetting! what relief it would be for the world to lose some of its contents!”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

419. “We shouldn’t be intimidated by someone else’s idea of perfection if it will prevent us from taking steps we actively want to take.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

420. “You’re incredibly beautiful,′ I told her, because she was fat, so I thought it would be an especially nice compliment, and also make her like me again, even though I was sexist.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

421. “I need an office, so I can have a place where I don’t write.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

422. “Our response to the factory farm is ultimately a test of how we respond to the powerless, to the most distant, to the voiceless – it is a test of how we act when no one is forcing us to act one way or another. Consistency is not required, but engagement with the problem is.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

423. “Long before man traveled into space, rabbis debated how one would observe Shabbat there-not because they anticipated space travel but because Buddhists strive to live with questions and Jews would rather die.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

424. “Abraham didn’t say, “What do you want?” He didn’t say, “Yes?” He answered with a statement: “Here I am.” Whatever God needs or wants, Abraham is wholly present for Him, without conditions or reservations or need for explanation.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

425. “There has yet to be a human to survive a span of history without at least one end of the world.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

426. “I think after you live it’s like before you lived.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

427. “Highs and lows make you feel that things matter, but they’re nothing.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

428. “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

429. “But even if the average life expectancy continued to increase by one year with each passing year, it would take forever for people to live forever, so probably no one would ever see it.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

430. “After fleeing Nazi-occupied Poland, Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer compared species bias to the “most extreme racist theories.” Singer argued that animal rights was the purest form of social-justice advocacy, because animals are the most vulnerable of all the downtrodden. He felt that mistreating animals was the epitome of the “might-makes-right” moral paradigm. We trade their most basic and important interests against fleeting human ones only because we can.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

431. “According to Project Drawdown, four of the most effective strategies for mitigating global warming are reducing food waste, educating girls, providing family planning and reproductive healthcare, and collectively shifting to a plant-rich diet. The benefits of these advancements extend far beyond the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, and their primary cost is our collective effort.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

432. “Feeling pain is still better than not feeling, isn’t it?”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

433. “No one fired a pistol to mark the start of the race to the bottom. The earth just tilted and everyone slid into the hole.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

434. “Regarding US government recommendations that tend to encourage dairy consumption in the name of preventing osteoporosis, Nestle notes that in parts of the world where milk is not a staple of the diet, people often have less osteoporosis and fewer bone fractures than Americans do. The highest rates of osteoporosis are seen in countries where people consume the most dairy foods.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

435. “When you’re a dad, there’s no one above you. If I don’t do something that has to be done, who is going to do it?”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

436. “To try to live.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

437. “The more exposure people have to the realities of factory farming, the more we will see people rejecting it. It’s already happening.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

438. “The question, I’ve come to think, is not what inspires one to change, but what inspires one to remain changed.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

439. “I put my hand on him. Touching him has always been important to me, it was something I lived for. I never could explain why. Little, nothing touches, my fingers against his shoulder, the outsides of our thighs touching as we squeeled together on the bus. I couldnt explain it, but I needed it. Sometimes I imagined stiching all of our little touches together. How many hundreds of thousands of fingers brushing against each other does it take to make love?”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

440. “In the end, everyone loses everyone.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

441. “But that slip of paper wouldn’t disappear, ever, and neither would the image of his prostrate wife, and neither would the thought that if he could, it might greatly improve his life to end it.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

442. “A powerful wind swept through the shtetl, making it whistle. Those studying obscure texts in dimly lit rooms looked up. Lovers making amends and promises, amendments and excuses, fell silent.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

443. “I’m a novelist, I’m not an activist. I’m not a non-fiction writer, I’m not a journalist. I’m not a foodie, I’m not even really an animal person, or an environmentalist. I did the best I could with this, but it’s not who I am.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

444. “I’d rather somebody hate what I do than be indifferent to it.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

445. “TV guy and sometimes cooker Gordon Ramsay can get pretty macho with baby animals when doing publicity for something he’s selling, but you’ll never see a puppy peeking out of one of his pots. And though he once said he’d electrocute his children if they became vegetarian, I wonder what his response would be if they poached the family pooch.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

446. “Sitting with her now, rehearsing the horrible conversation, Jacob wondered if maybe, all those years, he had misunderstood the spaces surrounding Julia: her quiet, her steps back. Maybe they weren’t buffers of defense, but of the most extreme humility, the purest generosity. What if she wasn’t withdrawing, but beckoning? Or both at the same time? Withdrawing and beckoning? And more to the point: making a world for their children, even for Jacob.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

447. “Encoded into our language is the understanding that disasters tend to expose that which was previously hidden. As the planetary crisis unfolds as a series of emergencies, our decisions will reveal who we are.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

448. “I am the one who broke the rule. But I am the one who made the rule you couldn’t live with.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

449. “I have made my own choice, which is vegetarianism, but it’s not the choice I’m imposing on anybody else.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

450. “Once upon a time, USDA inspectors had to condemn any bird with such fecal contamination. But about thirty years ago, the poultry industry convinced the USDA to reclassify feces so that it could continue to use these automatic eviscerators. Once a dangerous contaminant, feces are now classified as a “cosmetic blemish.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer