Quotes from Jonathan Safran Foer

I decided then and there never to become someone who told jokes when explanations were impossible.

I couldn't explain my need to myself, and that's why it was such a beautiful need

creating a trail of things i wasn't able to tell you

Of course, consumers might notice that their chickens don't taste quite right — how good could a drug-stuffed, disease-ridden, shit-contaminated animal possibly taste? — but the birds will be injected (or otherwise pumped up) with "broths" and salty solutions to give them what we have come to think of as the chicken look, smell, and taste.

Family are the people who must make you feel ashamed when you are deserving of shame.

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.

Another reason it would be a good invention is that there are so many times when you know you're feeling a lot of something, but you don't know what the something is.

maybe great books were coiled within him like springs, books that could have separated inside from outside.

And the general shot my sister. I could not look at her, but I remember the sound of when she hit the ground. I hear that sound when things hit the ground still. Anything.' If I could, I would make it so nothing ever hit the ground again.

About 3 million pounds of antibiotics are given to humans each year, but a whopping 17.8 million pounds are fed to livestock.

I am very simple to enchant.

I hope you never have to think about anything as much as I think about you.

S]o if the device of the person in the ambulance detected the device of the person he loved the most, or the person who loved him the most, and the person in the ambulance was really badly hurt, and might even die, the ambulance could flash GOODBYE! I LOVE YOU! GOODBYE! I LOVE YOU!

According to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, if cows were a country, they would rank third in greenhouse gas emissions, after China and the United States.

I wondered, for the first time in my life, if life was worth all the work it took to live. What exactly made it worth it? What's so horrible about being dead forever, and not feeling anything, and not even dreaming? What so great about feeling and dreaming?

There are worse things, worse than being like us. Look, at least we're alive.

Don't you find that strange? I can't believe I never found it strange before. It's like your name, how you don't notice it for so long, but when you finally do, you can't help but say it over and over, and wonder why you never thought it was strange that you should have that name, and that everyone has been calling you that name for you whole life.

I opened the coffin. I was surprised again, although again I shouldn't have been. I was surprised that Dad wasn't there. In my brain I knew he wouldn't be, obviously, but I guess my heart believed something else. Or maybe I was surprised by incredibly empty it was. I felt like I was looking into the dictionary definition of emptiness.

I think after you live it's like before you lived.

If we don't demonstrate solidarity through small collective sacrifices, we will not win the war, and if we do not win the war, we will lose the childhood home of every human who has ever lived.

People are always mistaking something that looks good for something that feels good.

I did not feel that he owed it to me. And I did not feel like I owed it to him. We owed it to each other, which is something different.

He asked what was wrong. It's just that why would you have one for him and not one for my dad? What do you mean! It isn't fair. What isn't fair! My dad was good. Mohammed Atta was evil. So! So my dad deserves to be in there. What makes you think it's good to be in here! Because it means you're biographically significant. And why is that good! I want to be significant. Nine out of ten significant people have to do with money or war!

Writing is like pulling teeth out of your penis.