Quotes from Jonathan Safran Foer

Feeding my children is not like feeding myself: it matters more.

In high school I became a vegetarian more times than I can now remember, most often as an effort to claim some identity in a world of people whose identities seemed to come effortlessly.

Jews have a special relationship to books, and the Haggadah has been translated more widely, and reprinted more often, than any other Jewish book. It is not a work of history or philosophy, not a prayer book, user's manual, timeline, poem or palimpsest - and yet it is all these things.

I spent my life learning to feel less.

The bruises go away, and so does how you hate, and so does the feeling that everything you receive from life is something you have earned.

When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much.

I'm sorry for my inability to let unimportant things go, for my inability to hold on to the important things.

Part of living your life is an awareness of the opportunities that can be missed and an awareness that time moves in one direction.

Literature has drawn a funny perimeter that other art forms haven't.

There are a lot of things that we crave, there are a lot of things that would make us perhaps more fulfilled in a sensory way that we just say no to.

My life story is the story of everyone I've ever met.

I got incredibly heavy boots about how relatively insignificant life is, and how, compared to the universe and compared to time, it didn't even matter if I existed at all.

Each day has been chained to the previous one. But the weeks have wings. Anyone who believes that a second is faster than a decade did not live my life.

Technology celebrates connectedness, but encourages retreat.

I am not a bad person. I am a good person who has lived in a bad time." Alex's grandfather..Everything is Illuminated

What were we spending so much time doing if not getting to know each other?

When I looked at you, my life made sense. Even the bad things made sense. They were necessary to make you possible.

Everyone is always in need of something that another person can give, be it undivided attention, a kind word or deep empathy. There is no better use of a life than to be attentive to such needs.

Life is scarier than death.

Books are for those without real lives, he thought. And they are no real replacement.

I wanted so much to have a life. Even just once, even for a second.

If it weren't my life, I wouldn't have believed it.

I went to the guest room and pretended to write. I hit the space bar again and again and again. My life story was spaces.

It would be possible, in theory, for life and art to be reversed.