Quotes from Jonathan Safran Foer

I said I kicked a French chicken in the stomach once. Huh? It said, 'Oeuf.' What is that? It's a joke. Do you want to hear another, or have you already had un oeuf?

The UN special envoy on food called it a 'crime against humanity' to funnel 100 million tons of grain and corn to ethanol when almost a billion people are starving. So what kind of crime is animal agriculture, which uses 756 million tons of grain and corn per year, much more than enough to adequately feed the 1.4 billion human who are living in dire poverty?

I believed him. I was not stupid. I was his wife.

Find a printer paper and imagine a full-grown bird shaped something like a football with legs standing on it. Imagine 33,000 of these rectangles in a grid. (Broilers are never in cages, and never on multiple levels.) Now enclose the grid with windowless walls and put a ceiling on top. Run in automated (drug-laced) feed, water, heating, and ventilation systems. This is a farm.

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.

I felt it very moving to feel his touch, and to remember that hands can also show love.

Let's go to bed. Those four words differentiate a marriage from every other kind of relationship. We aren't going to find a way to agree, but let's go to bed. Not because we want to, but because we have to. We hate each other right now, but let's go to bed. It's the only one we have. Let's go to our sides, but the sides of the same bed. Let's retreat into ourselves, but together. How many conversations had ended with those four words? How many fights?

Compassion is a muscle that gets stronger with use, and the regular exercise of choosing kindness over cruelty would change us.

I have been waiting for you for so long." I pointed to the car. "We are searching for Trachimbrod." "Oh," she said and she released a river of tears. "You are here. I am it.

You do not have to utter anything you do not want to utter," I told her, and she said, "Then I would never utter another word again." "You do not have to do anything that you do not want to do." "Then I would never do anything again.

You have to do something bad to do something good.

She loved herself in love, she loved loving love, as love loves loving, and was able, in that way, to reconcile herself with a world that fell so short of what she would have hoped for. It was not the world that was the great and saving lie, but her willingness to make it beautiful and fair, to live a once-removed life, in a world once-removed from the one in which everyone else seemed to exist.

We aren't exactly emptying the oceans; it's more like clear-cutting a forest with thousands of species to create massive fields with one type of soybean.

God loves the plagiarist. And so it is written, 'God created humankind in His image, in the image of God He created them. God is the original plagiarizer. With a lack of reasonable sources from which to filch - man created in the image of what? the animals? - the creation of man was an act of reflexive plagiarizing; God looted the mirror. When we plagiarize, we are likewise creating in the image and participating in the completion of Creation.

As long as I am thinking, I am alive.

Or maybe what he fears is just the opposite: that nobody is looking; that his death, like his life, is without purpose; that there is neither greater good nor evil--only people living and dying because their bodies function and then do not; that the universe is a rip.

Everyone performs bad actions. I do. Father does. Even you do. A bad person is someone who does not lament his bad actions.

He was responsible. He was good. It's easy to be emotional. You can always make a scene. Highs and lows make you feel that things matter, but they're nothing. So what's something? Being reliable is something, being good.

Maybe I'll try to be more patient with morons.

It's a shame that we have to live, but it's a tragedy that we get to live only one life, because if I'd had two lives, I would have spent one of them with her.

It was inevitable: Yankel fell in love with his never-wife. He would wake from sleep to miss the weight that never depressed the bed next to him, remember in earnest the weight of gestures she never made, long for the un-weight of her un-arm slung over his too-real chest, making his widower's rememberences that much more convincing and his pain that much more real.

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

Deep down, the young are lonelier than the old.' I read that in a book somewhere and it's stuck in my head. Maybe it's true. Maybe it's not true. More likely, the young and the old are lonely in different ways, in their own ways...

It hurts me when you do not want to hurt me.