Quotes from Jonathan Safran Foer

Because they were young. Because one is young only once in a life lived only once. Because recklessness is the only fist to throw at nothingness. How much aliveness can one bear?

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

The end of suffering does not justify the suffering, what a mess I am, I thought, what a fool, how foolish and narrow, how worthless, how pinched and pathetic, how helpless.

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.

There are only two reactions to climate change: resignation or resistance. We can submit to death, or we can use the prospect of death to emphasize life.

If god exists, he is not to be believed in.

he enclosed pieces of string that he used to measure out his body--his head, thigh, forearm, finger, neck, everything. He wanted me to sleep with them under my pillow. He said that when he came back, we would remeasure his body against the string as proof that he hadn't changed.

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

I brought the birdcages to the windows. I opened the windows, and opened the birdcages. I poured the fish down the drain. I took the dogs and cats downstairs and removed their collars. I released the insects onto the street. And the reptiles. And the mice. I told them, Go. All of you. Go. And they went. And they didn't come back

Dogs are wonderful, and in many ways unique. But they are remarkably unremarkable in their intellectual and experiential capacities. Pigs are every bit as intelligent and feeling, by any sensible definition of the words. They can't hop into the back of a Volvo, but they can fetch, run and play, be mischievous, and reciprocate affection. So why don't they get to curl up by the fire? Why can't they at least be spared being tossed on the fire?

But when, at the end of my sophomore year, I became a philosophy major and started doing my first seriously pretentious thinking, I became a vegetarian again. The kind of willful forgetting that I was sure meat eating required felt too paradoxical to the intellectual life I was trying to shape. I thought life could, should, and must conform to the mold of reason. You can imagine how annoying this made me.

I started carrying blank books like this one around, which I would fill with all the things I couldn't say...

What were we spending so much time doing if not getting to know each other?

He looked so much like me, I could tell that he saw it, too, we shared the smile of recognizing ourselves in each other, how many imposters do I have? DO we all make the same mistakes, or has one of us gotten it right, or even just a bit less wrong, am I the imposter?

Can't you even tell me if I'm on the right track? Buckminster purred, and Dad shrugged his shoulders again. But if you don't tell me anything, how can I ever be right? He circled something in an article and said, Another way of looking at it would be, how could you ever be wrong?

Only now do I understand the war against boredom, the lost cause of empty hours, of empty days and nights.

Which, then, brings us closer to what we want to communicate: saying what we intend, or trying to say the opposite?

I wanted to hit him. I wanted to hold him. I wanted to shout myself into his ear.

What kind of world would we create if three times a day we activated our compassion and reason as we sat down to eat, if we had the moral imagination and the pragmatic will to change our most fundamental act of consumption?

We can choose to make changes, or we can be subject to other changes--mass migration, disease, armed conflict, a greatly diminished quality of life--but there is no future without change. The luxury of choosing which changes we prefer has an expiration date.

In the end, everyone loses everyone. There was no invention to get around that.

When you are in a car, bitch or no bitch, you can do anything you desire as long as you remain on your side.

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.

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.