Quotes from Jonathan Safran Foer

In effetti, il più famoso palazzo di New York è fatto di materiali provenienti da quasi tutti i posti tranne New York, proprio come la città deve la sua grandezza agli immigrati

Food ethics are so complex because food is bound to both taste buds and taste, to individual biographies and social histories.

D'après toi, pourquoi es-tu ici, Oskar ? - Je suis ici, docteur, parce que maman est inquiète que la vie me mette devant des difficultés insurmontables. - Est-ce qu'elle a raison de s'inquiéter ? - Pas vraiment. La vie est une difficulté insurmontable.

Before child labor laws, there were businesses that treated their ten-year-old employees well. society didn't ban child labor because it's impossible to imagine children working in a good environment, but because when you give that much power to businesses over powerless individuals, it's corrupting. 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.

The end of the world has come often, and continues to often come. Unforgiving, unrelenting, bringing darkness upon darkness, the end of the world is something we have become well acquainted with, habitualized, made into a ritual. It is our religion to try to forget it in its absence, make peace with it when it is undeniable, and return its embrace when it finally comes for us, as it always does.

Googol?'' ''That's a one with one hundred zeroes after it.

Mr. Black started singing a song in some weird language, which I guess was Philippinish.

Brod discovered 613 sadnesses, each perfectly unique, each a singular emotion, no more similar to any other sadness than to anger, ecstasy, guilt, or frustration. Mirror Sadness. Sadness of Domesticated Birds. Sadness of Being Sad in Front of One's Parent. Humor Sadness. Sadness of Love Without Release.

Lui scrisse: Io non so come vivere Neanch'io, ma sto tentando. Non so come tentare

Parents are always more knowledgeable than their children and children are always smarter than their parents.

Maybe it's true that you can use up all of your tears...It was nice to think about, because what I wanted was to be empty.

I think and think and think, I've thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.

Allora il mio papà merita di stare nell'archivio' 'Cosa ti fa pensare che sia un bene starci?' 'Pechè vuol dire che uno è biograficamente significativo' 'E perché, questo è un bene?' 'Io voglio essere significativo.' 'Nove persone significative su dieci hanno a che fare coi soldi o con la guerra

The more I found, the less I understood.

The factory farm industry (in alliance with the pharmaceutical industry) currently has more power than public-health professionals... We give it to them. We have chosen, unwittingly, to fund this industry on a massive scale by eating factory-farmed animal products (and water sold as animal products) - and we do so daily.

I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live, Oskar.     Because if I were able to live my life again, I would do things differently.

Anyone who believes that a second is faster than a decade did not live my life.

It's always possible to wake someone from sleep, but no amount of noise will wake someone who is pretending to be asleep.

I am a very sad person. I am always sad, I think. Perhaps this signifies that I am not sad at all, because sadness is something lower than your normal disposition, and I am always the same thing. Perhaps I am the only person in the world, then, who never becomes sad. Perhaps I am lucky.

sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all of the lives I'm not living.

Sometimes my hand starts to burn and I am convinced we are writing the same word at the same moment.

She told him of ship voyages she had taken to places he had never heard of, and stories he knew were all untrue, were bad non-truths, even, but he nodded and tried to convince himself to be convinced, tried to believe her, because he knew that the origin of a story is always an absence, and he wanted her to live among presences.

I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live, Oskar.     Because if I were able to live my life again, I would do things differently. I would change my life.

E' la tragedia di amare, non si può amare niente più di quello che ci manca.