Quotes from Jonathan Safran Foer

There are more places you haven't heard of then you're heard of!' I loved that

I couldn't tell what he was feeling, because I couldn't speak the language of his feelings.

No one motorist can cause a traffic jam. But no traffic jam can exist without individual motorists. We are stuck in traffic because we are the traffic. The ways we live our lives, the actions we take and don't take, can feed the systemic problems, and they can also change them...

He talked and talked, his words fell through him, trying to find the floor of his sadness.

There are times when one needs to disappear while in the living room, and sometimes one simply wants to disappear.

I spent my life learning to feel less. Every day I felt less. Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?

des verstorbenen Philosophen Pinchas T., der in seiner einzigen bedeutenden Abhandlung An den Staub: vom Menschen bist du, und zum Menschen sollst du werden argumentierte, es sei theoretisch möglich, das Leben und die Kunst gegeneinander auszutauschen.

My friends are appeased to stay in Odessa for their entire lives. They are appeased to age like their parents, and become parents like their parents. They do not desire anything more than everything they have known. OK, but this is not for me, and it will not be for Little Igor.

there were so many different ways to die, and I just need to know which was his.

Nothing goes away. Not on its own. You deal with it, or it deals with you.

Being with him made my brain quiet.

But the future lay open, a thousand kaleidoscopic possibilities with a small quick heartbeat, delicate and impatient

We go on killing each other to no purpose! It is war waged by humanity against humanity, and it will only end when there's no one left to fight!

I have an aristocratic smile and like to punch people.

Isn't it so weird how the number of dead people is increasing, though the earth stays the same size, so that one day there isn't going to be a room to bury anyone anymore?

I went to my grandmother... and asked her to write a letter. I hardly knew her. I didn't have any interest in knowing her. I have no need for the past, I thought, like a child. I did not consider that the past might have a need for me. What kind of letter? my grandmother asked. I told her to write whatever she wanted to write. You want a letter from me? she asked. I told her yes. Oh, God bless you, she said.

Sea horses have complicated routines for courtship, and tend to mate under full moons, making musical sounds while doing so.

We're here, the glow of 1804 will say in one and a half centuries. We're here, and we're alive.

She took the posters downtown that afternoon. She filled a rolling suitcase with them ... she took a stapler. And a box of staples. And hope. I think of those things. The paper, the stapler, the staples, the tape, the hope. It makes me sick. Physical things. Forty years of loving someone becomes staples and hop.

You used to write such honest books. Honest and emotionally ambitious. Maybe they weren't finding millions of readers. Maybe they weren't making you rich. But they were making the world rich

It was not the Jew, of course, who invented the love poem, but the other way around.

I'm not mad at you, she said. Not even a little? No. Do you still love me? It didn't seem like the perfect time to mention that I had already made copies of the key for the deliverer from Pizza Hut, and the UPS person, and, also the nice guys from Greenpeace, so they could leave me articles on manatees and other animals that are going extinct when Stan is getting coffee. I've never loved you more.

We believe that the environmental crisis is caused by large outside forces and therefore can be solved only by large outside forces. But recognizing that we are responsible for the problem is the beginning of taking responsibility for the solution.

I have witnessed Grandfather cry, and I implore myself to say that I desire to never witness him cry again. If this signifies that I must do things for him so that he will not cry, then I will do those things. If this signifies that I must not look when he cries, then I will not look.