Quotes from Jonathan Safran Foer

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

You do not have to present not-truths to me, Sasha. I am not a child. (But I do. That is what you always fail to understand. I present not-truths to protect you. I exist in case you need to be protected.) I do not understand, I said. (I understand.) You do not? he said. (You do.) ... I am not a bad person, he said. I am a good person who has lived in a bad time. I know this, I said. (Even if you were a bad person, I would still know you are a good person.)

It was only then that I observed that the key was reaching toward the bed. Because it was relatively heavy, the effect was small. The string pulled incredibly gently at the back of my neck, while the key floated just a tiny bit off my chest. I thought about all the metal buried in Central Park. Was it being pulled, even if just a little, to the bed?

There's nothing wrong with not understanding yourself.

Wolf Blitzer had once again relieved the horrible tension of his purgatorial beard—neither a beard nor not a beard—with yet another new pair of glasses.

My boots were so heavy that I was glad there was a column beneath us. How could such a lonely person have been living so close to me my whole life? If I had known, I would have gone up to keep him company. . . It made me start to wonder if there were other people so lonely so close.

What do you think is going on?' 'I feel too much. That's what's going on.' 'Do you think one can feel too much? Or just feel in the wrong ways?

Everyone could know what everyone else felt, and we could be more careful with each other, because you'd never want to tell a person whose skin was purple that you're angry at her for being late, just like you would want to pat a pink person on the back and tell him, "Congratulations!

On average, Americans eat the equivalent of 21,000 entire animals in a lifetime—one

So she had to satisfy herself with the idea of love - loving the loving of things whose existence she didn't care at all about. Love itself became the object of her love. She loved herself in love, she loved loving love, as love loves loving, and was able, in that way, to reconcile herself with a world that fell so short of what she would have hoped for.

Feeling pain is still better than not feeling, isn't it?

Give it a try. Bellybutton." "Bellybutton doesn't make me think of anything." "Dig deep." "In my bellybutton?" "In your brain, Oskar." "Uh." "Bellybutton. Bellybutton." "Stomach anus?

After fleeing Nazi-occupied Poland, Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer compared species bias to the "most extreme racist theories." Singer argued that animal rights was the purest form of social-justice advocacy, because animals are the most vulnerable of all the downtrodden. He felt that mistreating animals was the epitome of the "might-makes-right" moral paradigm. We trade their most basic and important interests against fleeting human ones only because we can.

In its eyes I was sure I saw some form of understanding, but I didn't see forgiveness.

Brod was afraid any tears of her own would cause the walls of the old house to give way, so she sandbagged them behind her eyes, exiled them to someplace deeper, safer.

When I had thought I was dying at the base of the Loschwitz Bridge, there was a single thought in my head: Keep thinking. Thinking would keep me alive. But now I am alive, and thinking is killing me.

Non potevo sapere cosa stava provando, perché non potevo capire il linguaggio dei suoi sentimenti. Io non sapevo che è New York. In cinese ny è tu. Credevo che voleva dire 'Io amo tu'. E' stato allora che ho notato i poster 'I<3 NY' sulle porte, e gli strofinacci 'I <3 NY' e il contenitore per alimenti 'I <3 NY' sul tavolo della cucina

She is deranged," I said, "but so so playful.

And she was in love.

Everything she did reminded me of someone else.

How, after all, can one miss something one has never known?

The persistence of the story of animal consent into the contemporary era tells of a human appreciation of the stakes, and a desire to do the right thing.

Ela escreveu: quem me dera ser outra vez rapariga e ter a possibilidade de viver de novo a minha vida. Sofri muito mais que o necessário. E as alegrias que tive nem sempre foram alegres. Podia ter vivido de uma maneira diferente.

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