Quotes from Jonathan Safran Foer

Home is the place with the most rules.

I was thankful, said my father, for the make-believe.

Once upon a time there was a person whose life was so good there was no story to tell about it.

He would wake from sleep to miss the weight that never depress 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 remembrances that much more convincing and the pain that much more real.

I like to see people reunited, maybe that's a silly thing, but what can I say, I like to see people run to each other, I like the kissing and the crying, I like the impatience, the stories that the mouth can't tell fast enough, the ears that aren't big enough, the eyes that can't take in all of the change, I like the hugging, the bringing together, the end of missing someone

It's a shame that we have to live, but it's a tragedy that we only have one life

There is something about eating animals that tends to polarize: never eat them or never sincerely question eating them; become an activist or disdain activists.

What we forget about animals we begin to forget about ourselves.

The justifications for eating animals and for not eating them are often identical: we are not them.

So many days in their shared life. So many experiences. How had they managed to spend the previous sixteen years unlearning each other?

It stayed with him, like a part of him, like a birthmark, like a limb, it was on him, in him, him, his hymn: I had to do it for myself.

I ripped the page from my book - I don't speak, I'm sorry. - and used it to dry her cheeks, my explanation and apology ran down her face like mascara.

She said I could have a seat on the couch if I wanted to, but I told her I didn't believe in leather, so I stood.

But there was always work to be done. We spent our lives making livings.

He awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounded and as impossible as it actually was, happy.

When you're a dad, there's no one above you. If I don't do something that has to be done, who is going to do it?

Why does watching a dog be a dog fill one with happiness?

For Nicole, my idea of beauty

I put my hands into the pockets of all his jackets

I thought he had to look for what he was looking for, and realize it no longer existed, or never existed. p. 233

I was pretending to be a monster, and I became a monster.

it broke my heart into more pieces than my heart was made of

We need enormous pockets, pockets big enough for our families, and our friends, and even the people who aren't on our lists, people we've never met but still want to protect. We need pockets for boroughs and for cities, a pocket that could hold the universe. But I knew 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.

There are only so many times that you can utter 'It does not hurt' before it begins to hurt more than the hurt. You become enlightened of the feeling of hurt, which is worse, I am certain, than the existent hurt.