Quotes from Jonathan Safran Foer

The philosopher Elaine Scarry has observed that beauty always takes place in the particular. Cruelty, on the other hand, prefers abstraction.

It is my great hope that our paths, however long and winding, will cross again.

My boots were so heavy that I was glad there was a column beneath us. How could such a lonely person have been living so close to me my whole life? If I had known, I would have gone up to keep him company.

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

No, I do not like music. (But what she really was trying to say was this: I like music better than anything in the world, after you.)

I know a lot about birds and bees, but I don't know very much about the birds and the bees. Everything I do know I had to teach myself on the Internet, because I don't have anyone to ask. For example, I know that you give someone a blowjob by putting your penis in their mouth.

Dear Anna, we will live in a home with no walls, so that everywhere we go will be our home.

Cruelty depends on an understanding of cruelty, and the ability to choose against it. Or to choose to ignore it.

There are many premium writers, yes? Tolstoy, yes? He wrote War , and also Peace , which are both premium books.

Maybe that's what a person's personality is: the difference between the inside and outside.

Not to have a choice is also a choice.

Jacob wrestled with God for the blessing. He wrestled with Esau for the blessing. He wrestled with Isaac for the blessing, with Laban for the blessing, and in each case he eventually prevailed. He wrestled because he recognized that the blessings were worth the struggle. He knew that you only get to keep what you refuse to let go of.

He Wrote, Are you OK? I told him, My eyes are crummy. He wrote, But are you OK? I told him, That's a very complicated question. He wrote, That's a very simple answer. I asked, Are you OK? He wrote, Some mornings I wake up feeling grateful.

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.

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

i couldn't speak the language of his feelings

Does it break my heart, of course, every moment of every day, into more pieces than my heart was made of...

Succotash my Balzac, dipshiitake.

Am I such a bad person for dreaming of a world that ends when I do? I don't mean the world ending with respect to me, but every set of eyes closing with mine.

The factory farm has succeeded by divorcing people from their food, eliminating farmers, and ruling agriculture by corporate fiat.

I got tired, I told him. Not worn out, but worn through. Like one of those wives who wakes up one morning and says I can't bake any more bread.

I realized that your mother couldn't see the emptiness, she couldn't see anything...All of the words I'd written to her over all of those years, had I never said anything to hear at all?

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.

We need much bigger pockets I thought as I lay in my bed counting off the seven minutes that it takes a normal person to fall asleep. We need enormous pockets pockets big enough for our families and our friends and even the people who aren't on our lists people we've never met but still want to protect. We need pockets for borough and for cities a pocket that could hold the universe.