Quotes from Jonathan Safran Foer

Die Ohnmacht des Einzelnen ist der Grund, aus dem alle es versuchen muessen

Entweder suchen wir uns aus, was wir veraendern, oder wir werden diejenigen sein, auf die sich Veraenderungen auswirken

What we don't wrestle we let go of. Love isn't the absence of struggle. Love is struggle.

Shame] is the core experience of the ethical.

This is what my grandmother meant when she said, "If nothing matters, there's nothing to save.

That really changed me, when I realized that an excruciating life is worse than an excruciating death.

For every ten tuna, sharks, and other large predatory fish that were in our oceans fifty to a hundred years ago, only one is left.

It was not the feeling of completeness I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty

Every turkey sold in every store and served in every restaurant was the product of artificial insemination. If it were only for efficiency, that would be one thing, but these animals literally can't reproduce naturally. Tell me what could be sustainable about that?

Once upon a time there was a man whose life was so good there's no story to tell about it.

As Pollan explains, "Eating industrial meat takes an almost heroic act of not knowing, or, now, forgetting.

At least etymologically speaking, when we talk about influenza we are talking about the influences that shape the world everywhere at once. Today's bird flu or swine flu viruses or the 1918 Spanish flu virus are not the real influenza — not the underlying influence — but only its symptom.

But he didn't say anything, and neither did she. Not because the words were deliberately withheld, but because the pipeline between them was too occluded for such bravery.

Era un genio della tristezza, e in essa si tuffava distinguendone i molti fili, apprezzandone le sfumature più sottili. Era un prisma attraverso cui la tristezza poteva suddividersi enl suo infinito sprettro. Brod, inventrice delle 613 Tristezze

sometimes accused of using cynical strategies for attention getting, which has some truth to it. PETA is also accused of arguing that humans and animals should be treated equally, which they don't. (What would that even mean? Voting cows?)

She was unhappy, although unconvinced that her unhappiness wouldn't be someone else's happiness. She felt unfulfilled desire—profound amounts of it—but presumably so did every other married and unmarried person. She wanted more, but didn't know if there was more to be found. Not knowing used to feel inspiring. It felt like faith. Now it felt agnostic. Like not knowing.

When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own.

Everywhere you looked, there it wasn't.

There's a Hasidic proverb: 'While we pursue happiness, we flee from contentment.

Perhaps in the back of our minds we already understand, without all the science I've discussed, that something terribly wrong is happening. Our sustenance now comes from misery. We know that if someone offers to show us a film on how our meat is produced, it will be a horror film.

A me piace vedere le persone riunite, forse è sciocco, ma che dire, mi piace vedere la gente che si corre incontro, mi piacciono i baci e i pianti, amo l'impazienza, le storie che la bocca non riesce a raccontare abbastanza in fretta, le orecchie che non sono abbastanza grandi, gli occhi che non abbracciano tutto il cambiamento, mi piacciono gli abbracci, la ricomposizione, la fine della mancanza di qualcuno.

I know that it is not necessary that there be one right thing. There may be two right things. There may be no right things.

So much sublimation: domestic closeness had become intimate distance, intimate distance had become shame, shame had become resignation, resignation had become fear, fear had become resentment, resentment had become self-protection.

And so it is with prayer, with true prayer, which is never a request, and never praise, but the expression of something of extreme significance that would otherwise have no way to be expressed. As Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, 'Prayer may not save us. But prayer may make us worthy of being saved.' We are made worthy, made righteous, by expression.