Quotes from Jonathan Safran Foer

Every factory-farmed animal is, as a practice, treated in ways that would be illegal if it were a dog or a cat.

Again and again we are confronted with the reality - some might say the problem - of sharing our space with other living things, be they dogs, trees, fish or penguins.

Shyness is when you turn your head away from something you want.

Books are slow, books are quiet. The Internet is fast and loud.

Why do I write? It's not that I want people to think I am smart, or even that I am a good writer. I write because I want to end my loneliness.

In America right now, we use words like 'smart' to talk about bombs. American rhetoric is grounded in ideas of capital-G Good, capital-E Evil, and it's very clear who is on which side. But in a book you can do just the opposite. You can use all lower-case words.

I know you look both ways before you cross the street, but I want you to look both ways a second time, because I told you to.

I see bad stuff on the street all the time that I don't do anything about. I do bad stuff myself all the time. The goal is not to somehow be perfect - that's silly, that's naive. The goal is to just recognize there are choices in front of us, and to try to make better ones.

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

I can only hold on to the things I want to lose.

I said I kicked a French chicken in the stomach once." "Huh?" "It said, 'Oeuf.'" "What is that?" "It's a joke. Do you want to hear another, or have you already had un oeuf?

That's all anyone wants from anyone else, not love itself but the knowledge that love is there.

Sometimes one simply wants to disappear.

We eat as sons and daughters, as families, as communities, as generations, as nations, and increasingly as a globe. We can't stop our eating from radiating influence even if we want to.

We shouldn't be intimidated by someone else's idea of perfection if it will prevent us from taking steps we actively want to take.

People who want to find a place of rest, want to find an integrated personality, sense of self, want fewer fractures in their lives.

These little daily choices that we're so used to thinking are irrelevant are the most important thing we do all day long.

Only now do I understand the war against boredom, the lost cause of empty hours, of empty days and nights.

I will never come around to the idea of an anthropomorphic God. I'm also uncomfortable with the word 'God'... I'm agnostic about the answer and I'm agnostic about the question.

It's hard to draw clear lines between writing and life and I don't think it is necessary to or necessarily good to.

There are two kinds of sculptures. There's the kind that subtracts: Michelangelo starts with a block of marble and chips away. And then there is the kind that adds, building with clay, piling it on. The way I write novels is to keep piling on and piling on and piling on.

What the world does not need is a Haggadah that pats itself on the back. It needs a Haggadah that gets out of the way, that starts a conversation and gets out of the way.

Everyone performs bad actions... A bad person is someone who does not lament his bad actions.

I wondered, for the first time in my life, if life was worth all the work it took to live. What exactly made it worth it?