Quotes from Jonathan Safran Foer

Your books are arranged by the color of their spines, she said. How stupid.

If I misuse a corporation's logo, I could potentially be put in jail; if a corporation abuses a billion birds, the law will protect not the birds, but the corporation's right to do what it wants. That is what it looks like when you deny animals rights. It's crazy that the idea of animal rights seems crazy to anyone. We live in a world in which it's conventional to treat an animal like a hunk of wood and extreme to treat an animal like an animal. Before

No father knows that he is carrying his son up the stairs for the final time

how can you say I love you to someone you love?

Everything that's born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they're all on fire, and we're al trapped.

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's so great about feeling and dreaming?

Most simply put, someone who regularly eats factory-farmed animal products cannot call himself an environmentalist without divorcing that word from its meaning.

You are very funny Jonathan. No. That is the last thing I want to be. Why? To be funny is a great thing. No it's not. Why is this? I used to thing that humor was the only way to appreciate how wonderful and terrible the world is, to celebrate how big life is. You know what I mean? Yes of course. But now I think it's the opposite. Humor is a way of shrinking from that wonderful and terrible world.

Shyness is when you turn your head away from something you want.     Shame is when you turn your head away from something you do not want.

It's so cold in Yukatia, which is in Siberia, that breath instantly freezes with a crackling noise that they call the whispering of the stars. On extremely cold days, the towns are covered in a fog caused by the breath of humans and animals.

Julia Bloch: 43. Wife of Jacob. Architect, although secretly ashamed of referring to herself as such, given that she's never built a building. Immensely talented, tragically overburdened, perpetually unappreciated, seasonally optimistic. Often wonders if all it would take to completely change her life would be a complete change of context.

The beach was beautiful last night, but this did not surprise me. I love sitting on the edge of the land and feeling the water verge me, and then leave me. Sometimes I remove my shoes and put my feet where I think the water will approach to. I have attempted to think about America in regard to where I am on the beach. I imagine a line, a white line, painted on the sand and on the ocean, from me to you.

Yet we wanted human feeling, gestures free from suspicion, some sympathetic if stammering articulation, half syllables of mystification, a temporary eternal.

Our dreams cannot exist at the same time. I am so young, and he is so aged, and both of these facts should make us people who are deserving of their dreams, but this is not a possibility.

Highs and lows make you feel that things matter, but they're nothing." "So what's something?" "Being reliable is something. Being good." "And

half months ago. There were fourteen kids in the class, and we all had on neat white robes. We practiced bowing, and then we were all sitting down Native American style

For every ten tuna, sharks, and other large fish that were in our oceans less than a century ago, only one is left. Many scientists predict the total collapse of all fished species in less than fifty years.

Antropocentrisme: de mens staat bovenaan in de evolutie, we zijn een geschikte maatstaf om het leven van andere dieren tegen af te zetten en de rechtmatige bezitter van al wat leeft.

Tiny acts of shitty retribution for tiny acts of shitty retribution for tiny acts of shitty retribution for an original offense that no one could remember. Or for no offense at all.

Regarding US government recommendations that tend to encourage dairy consumption in the name of preventing osteoporosis, Nestle notes that in parts of the world where milk is not a staple of the diet, people often have less osteoporosis and fewer bone fractures than Americans do. The highest rates of osteoporosis are seen in countries where people consume the most dairy foods.

Maybe we're just missing things we've lost, or hoping for what we want to come.

Even if Lady Macbeth could have removed that damn spot, wouldn't her hands have been red from all of the scrubbing?

Usamos una serie de teatrales señas con las manos para comunicar lo que un simple susurro habría hecho con la misma eficacia. Pero hemos hecho voto de silencio: ni una palabra hasta que estemos a salvo, de camino a casa.

She found the company that made her favorite architectural model trees. They weren't the most realistic, they weren't even well made. She didn't like them because they evoked trees but because they evoked the sadness that trees evoke.