Quotes from Jonathan Safran Foer

Death is the only thing in life that you absolutely have to be aware of as it's happening.

The only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad.

I can be funny, because I have time to meditate about how to be funny, and I can repair my mistakes when I perform mistakes, and I can be a melancholy person in manners that are interesting, not only melancholy. With writing, we have second chances.

When I got off the plane, after eleven hours of travel and forty years away, the man took my passport and asked me the purpose of my visit, I wrote in my daybook, To mourn, and then, To mourn try to live, he gave me a look and asked if I would consider that business or pleasure, I wrote, Neither. For how long do you plan to mourn and try to live? For as long as I can. Are we talking about a weekend or a year? I didn't write anything. The man said, Next.

We cannot keep the kinds of meals we have known and also keep the planet we have known. We must either let some eating habits go or let the planet go. It is that straightforward, that fraught.

Our unspoken agreements led to disagreements, to suffering.

It is dangerous to pretend that we know more than we do. But it is even more dangerous to pretend that we know less.

Blessings are just curses that other people envy.

He wrote, I do not know how to live. I do not know either, but I am trying. I do not know how to try. There were things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him, so I buried them, and let them hurt me.

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.

The moment before he started was my favorite moment.

Fuck You!' [Oskar said] 'Exuse me!' [His mom said] 'Sorry. I mean, screw you.' 'You need a time-out!' 'I need a mausoleum!

I walked into a bakery seven years later and there he was. He had dogs at his feet and a bird in a cage beside him. The seven years were not seven years. They were not seven hundred years. Their length could not be measured in years, just as an ocean could not explain the distance we had traveled, just as the dead can never be counted. I wanted to run away from him, and I wanted to go right up to him.

The wanting, the needing, the distance, the disappointment: growing, knowing, committing, aging beside another. Alone, one can live perfectly. But not a life.

I promised myself I wouldn't be the first to look away, but I was.

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

It feels like a moment I've lived a thousand times before, as if everything is familiar, right up to the moment of my death, that it will happen again an infinite number of times, that we will meet, marry, have our children, succeed in the ways we have, fail in the ways we have, all exactly the same, always unable to change a thing. I am again at the bottom of an unstoppable wheel, and when I feel my eyes close for death, as they have and will a thousand times, I awake.

was one of the best days of my life, a day during which I lived my life and didn't think about my life at all.

In the end, everyone looses 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.

They say that people who live next to waterfalls don't hear the water.

When we walk around thinking we have a greater right to eat an animal than the animal has a right to live without suffering, it's corrupting. I'm not speculating. This is our reality. Look at what factory farming is. Look at what we as a society have done to animals as soon as we had the technological power. Look at what we actually do in the name of "animal welfare" and "humaneness," then decide if you still believe in eating meat.

I wanted to build walls around him, I wanted to separate inside from outside, I wanted to give him an infinitely long blank book and the rest of time.

Nothing is beautiful and true.

Animal agriculture makes a 40% greater contribution to global warming than all transportation in the world combined; it is the number one cause of climate change.