Quotes from Jonathan Safran Foer

A powerful wind swept through the shtetl, making it whistle. Those studying obscure texts in dimly lit rooms looked up. Lovers making amends and promises, amendments and excuses, fell silent.

In the end, everyone loses everyone. There's no invention to get around that. And so, I felt that night like the turtle that everything in the universe was on top of.

We believed in our grandmother's cooking more fervently than we believed in God. Her culinary prowess was one of our family's primal stories, like the cunning of the grandfather I never met, or the single fight of my parents' marriage. We clung to those stories and depended on them to define us. We were the family that chose its battles wisely, and used wit to get out of binds, and loved the food of our matriarch.

Nobody wants to be a caricature. Nobody wants to be a diminished version of herself.

And instead of singing in the shower I would write out the lyrics of my favorite songs, the ink would turn the water blue or red or green, and the music would run down my legs.

It felt as if an only life should be better than good enough, but how many efforts for more have ended with having nothing?

YOU WILL DRINK THE COFFEE UNTIL I CAN SEE MY FACE IN THE BOTTOM OF THE CUP!" I did not mean to roar. "But it's a clay cup." "I DO NOT CARE!" He finished the coffee. "You did not have to finish it," I said, because I could perceive that he was rebuilding the Great Wall of China with shit bricks.

Hayat?m?n en güzel günlerinden biri, hayat?m? yaÅŸad???m ve hayat?m hakk?nda hiç düÅŸünmediÄŸim bir gündü.

she saw through the shell of me into the center of me … She went home with her father, the center of me followed her, but I was left with the shell of me

Did you manufacture any Z's?

Some of the names I could not reason, like the box marked DARKNESS, or the one with DEATH OF THE FIRSTBORN written in pencil on its front. I noticed that there was a box on the top of one of these skyscrapers of boxes that was marked DUST

It is said that the Messiah will come at the end of the world. But it was not the end of the world, Grandfather said. It was. He just did not come.

Cruelty: Not only the willful causing of unnecessary suffering, but the indifference to it.

The burning bush must not be consumed.

The power brokers of factory farming know that their business model depends on consumers not being able to see (or hear about) what they do.

What's it about? she asked. It's about love. She laughed. They're all about love.

I am a mother, she thought—not an answer to the question being asked, and no more her ultimate ambition than happiness, but her ultimate identity.

Herschel was a Jew. And he was my best friend. He was his best friend. And I murdered him.

Wings of a half finished book across his chest.

It might sound fantastic, but when we bother to look, it's hard to deny that our day-to-day choices shape the world.

And was the next word I lost, probably because it was so close to her name, what a simple word to say, what a profound word to lose.

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

And there was shame in being human: the shame of knowing that twenty of the roughly thirty-five classified species of sea horse worldwide are threatened with extinction because they are killed "unintentionally" in seafood production.

And I love the idea of books being more than books, or being, rather, something other than books. I think the ideal experience of my book would be like listening to music.