Quotes from Jonathan Safran Foer

I think it's very pretty. Can it be pretty if no one thinks it's pretty? I think it's pretty. If you're the only one? That's pretty pretty. And what about the boys? Don't you want them to think you're pretty? I wouldn't want a boy to think I was pretty unless he was the kind of boy who thought I was pretty.

When I heard your organization was recording testimonies, I knew I had to come. She died in my arms, saying 'I don't want to die.' That is what death is like. It doesn't matter what uniforms the soldiers are wearing. It doesn't matter how good the weapons are. I thought if everyone could see what I saw, we would never have war anymore.

We all choose things, and we also all choose against things. I want to be the kind of person who chooses for more than chooses against ...

Needless to say, jamming deformed, drugged, overstressed birds together in a filthy, waste-coated room is not very healthy. Beyond deformities, eye damage, blindness, bacterial infections of bones, slipped vertebrae, paralysis, internal bleeding, anemia, slipped tendons, twisted lower legs and necks, respiratory diseases, and weakened immune systems are frequent and long-standing problems on factory farms.

Grandfather informs me that is not possible.

She had been in love so many times that she began to suspect she was not falling in love, but rather doing something much more ordinary

If we are not given the option to live without violence, we are given the choice to center our meals around harvest or slaughter, husbandry or war. We have chosen slaughter. We have chosen war. That's the truest version of our story of eating animals. Can we tell a new story?

We were trying to make our lives easier, trying, with all our rules, to make life effortless. But a friction began to arise between Nothing and Something, in the morning the Nothing vase cast a Something shadow, like the memory of someone you've lost, what can you say about that, at night the Nothing light spilled from the guest room spilled under the Nothing door and stained the Something hallway, there's nothing to say.

There is nothing wrong with compromising. Even if you compromise almost everything.

I want an infinitely blank book and the rest of time.

A few weeks after the worst day, I started writing lots of letters. I don't know why, but it was one of the only things that made my boots lighter.

What is being awake if not interpreting our dreams, or dreaming if not interpreting our wake?

I try not to remember the life that I didn't want to lose but lost and have to remember

I wasn't having second thoughts, but I was having thoughts.

It was the first time I had ever made love. I wondered if he knew that. It felt like crying. I wondered, Why does anyone ever make love?

I used to think that humor was the only way to appreciate how wonderful and terrible the world is, to celebrate how big life is. But now I think the opposite. Humor is a way of shrinking from that wonderful and terrible world.

I loved having a dad who was smarter than the New York Times , and I loved how my cheek could feel the hairs on his chest through his T-shirt, and how he always smelled like shaving, even at the end of the day. Being with him made my brain quiet. I didn't have to invent a thing.

He ran the back of his hand up her cheek, with the pretense of wiping away sweat. Do you think you could ever love me? I don't think so. Because I'm not good enough. It's not like that. Because I'm not smart. No. Because you couldn't love me. Because I couldn't love you.

Ironically, the utterly unselective omnivore -- I'm easy; I'll eat anything -- can appear more socially sensitive than the individual who tries to eat in a way that is good for society.

It's always possible to wake someone from sleep, but no amount of noise will wake someone who is pretending to be asleep.

In sickness and in sickness. That is what I wish for you. Don't seek or expect miracles. There are no miracles. Not anymore. And there are no cures for the hurt that hurts most. There is only the medicine of believing each other's pain, and being present for it.

sometimes you have to put your fears in order...

If I'd been someone else in a different world I'd've done something different, but I was myself and the world was the world, so I was silent.

It was getting hard to keep all the things I didn't know inside me.