Quotes from Jonathan Safran Foer

What about little microphones? What if everyone swallowed them, and they played the sounds of our hearts through little speakers, which could be in the pouches of our overalls?

Everything is possible again." It was the perfect thing to write, because that was exactly how it felt. We could retell our stories and make them better, more representative or aspirational. Or we could choose to tell different stories. The world itself had another chance.

Different people will draw the line in different places with regard to farms like Paul's and Frank's. People I respect draw it differently. But for me, for now —for my family now —my concerns about the reality of what meat is and has become are enough to make me give it up altogether.

Just as nothing we do has the direct potential to cause nearly as much animal suffering as eating meat, no daily choice that we make has a greater impact on the environment.

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." The protective emphasis is not a law of nature; it comes from the stories we tell about nature.

Cruelty, on the other hand, prefers abstraction.

it strange how upset people get about a few dozen baseball players taking growth hormones, when we're doing what we're doing to our food animals and feeding them to our children?

The question of eating animals hits chords that resonate deeply with our sense of self—our memories, desires, and values. Those resonances are potentially controversial, potentially threatening, potentially inspiring, but always filled with meaning.

Good writers are pleasing, very good writers make you feel and think, great writers make you change.

Children bury their dead parents, because the dead need to be buried. Parents do not need to bring their children into the world, but children need to bring their parents out of it.

Jacob didn't want to coerce or be coerced, but what was he supposed to do? Sit on his hands waiting for his grandfather to shatter his hip and die in a hospital room as every abandoned old person is destined to do?

The world may be on the brink of another pandemic. All countries will be affected. Widespread illness will occur. Medical supplies will be inadequate. Large numbers of deaths will occur. Economic and social disruption will be great.

But not even to save your life?" "If nothing matters, there's nothing to save.

It's not a horrible word! He told me, putting a Cambodian mask on his face , But it's filled with a lot of horrible people!

Despite the name, Spanish flu struck the entire world — that's what made it a pandemic instead of simply an epidemic. It was not the first influenza pandemic, nor the most recent (1957 and 1968 also saw pandemics), but it was by far the most deadly. Whereas AIDS took roughly twenty-four years to kill 24 million people, the Spanish flu killed as many in twenty- four weeks.

I want to tell you everything, without leaving out a single detail. But where is the beginning? And what is everything?

the birds will be handled roughly and, as I was also told, the workers will regularly feel the birds' bones snapping in their hands.

scientists now argue that the primordial source of all flu strains is migrating aquatic birds such as ducks and geese that have roamed the earth for more than a hundred million years. The flu, it turns out, is all about our relationship with birds.

He would fall asleep with his heart at the foot of his bed, like some domesticated animal that was no part of him at all. And each morning he would wake with it again in the cupboard of his rib cage, having become a little heavier, a little weaker, but still pumping. And by midafternoon he was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else. I am not sad.

He conducted interviews with nearly a hundred USDA poultry inspectors from thirty-seven plants. "Every week," he reports, "millions of chickens leaking yellow pus, stained by green feces, contaminated by harmful bacteria, or marred by lung and heart infections, cancerous tumors, or skin conditions are shipped for sale to consumers." Next

If it was your child, do you want your child to suffer three years, three months, three weeks, three hours, three minutes? A turkey chick isn't a human baby, but it suffers. I've never met anyone in the industry — manager, vet, worker, anyone — who doubts that they feel pain. So how much suffering is acceptable? That's what's at the bottom of all of this, and what each person has to ask himself. How much suffering will you tolerate for your food? My

Het eten van dieren raakt ons in het diepste van ons wezen, in onze herinneringen, onze verlangens en onze waarden. Wat het bij ons losmaakt is potentieel controversieel, potentieel bedreigend, potentieel inspirerend, maar altijd betekenisvol.

Sadness of feeling the need to create beautiful things;

Embarrassment is the Parmalat of emotions.