Quotes from Jonathan Safran Foer

I like to see people reunited, I like to see people run to each other, I like the kissing and the crying, I like the impatience, the stories that the mouth can't tell fast enough, the ears that aren't big enough, the eyes that can't take in all of the change, I like the hugging, the bringing together, the end of missing someone.

Time was passing like a hand waving from a train I wanted to be on. I hope you never have to think about anything as much as I think about you.

I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love.

She was a genius of sadness, immersing herself in it, separating its numerous strands, appreciating its subtle nuances. She was a prism through which sadness could be divided into its infinite spectrum.

Why do beautiful songs make you sad?' 'Because they aren't true.' 'Never?' 'Nothing is beautiful and true.

There were things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him. So I buried them, and let them hurt me.

If there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it walls, and we will furnish it with soft, red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweller's felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does.

One day you will do things for me that you hate. That is what it means to be family.

She wants to know if I love her, that's all anyone wants from anyone else, not love itself but the knowledge that love is there, like new batteries in the flashlight in the emergency kit in the hall closet.

Songs are as sad as the listener.

So many people enter and leave your life! Hundreds of thousands of people! You have to keep the door open so they can come in! But it also means you have to let them go!

This is love, she thought, isn't it? When you notice someone's absence and hate that absence more than anything? More, even, than you love his presence?

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

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

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

It's the tragedy of loving, you can't love anything more than something you miss.

Humans are the only animal that blushes, laughs, has religion, wages war, and kisses with lips. So in a way, the more you kiss with lips, the more human you are. And the more you wage war.

I'm so afraid of losing something I love that I refuse to love anything

I missed you even when I was with you. That's been my problem. I miss what I already have, and I surround myself with things that are missing.

It would be refreshing to have a politician try to defend guns without any reference to the Second Amendment, but on the merits of guns.

It seems entirely possible to me that horrible things can be going on without us becoming horrible people.

Kids are a great analogy. You want your kids to grow up, and you don't want your kids to grow up. You want your kids to become independent of you, but it's also a parent's worst nightmare: That they won't need you. It's like the real tragedy of parenting.

The Torah is the foundational text for Jewish law, but the Haggadah is our book of living memory. We are not merely telling a story here. We are being called to a radical act of empathy. Here we are, embarking on an ancient, perennial attempt to give human lives - our lives - dignity.

There is a glaring reason that the necessary total ban on nontherapeutic use of antibiotics hasn't happened: The factory farm industry, allied with the pharmaceutical industry, has more power than public-health professionals.