Quotes from Jonathan Safran Foer

Also, I designed a pretty fascinating bracelet, where you put a rubber band around your favorite book of poems for a year, and then you take it off and wear it.

I would have done anything for him. Maybe that was my sickness.

We know, at least, that this decision (ending factory farming) will help prevent deforestation, curb global warming, reduce pollution, save oil reserves, lessen the burden on rural America, decrease human rights abuses, improve publish health, and help eliminate the most systematic animal abuse in history.

Sadness of love without release.

When you look up 'hilarious' in the dictionary, there's a picture of you.

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 read the first chapter of A Brief History of Time when Dad was still alive, and 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.

To feel alone is to be alone.

I'm a vegetarian. You're a what? I don't eat meat. How can you not eat meat? I just don't. He says he does not eat meat. What? No meat? No meat. Steak? No... Chickens! No... And what about the sausage? No, no sausage, no meat! He says he does not eat any meat. Not even sausage? I know! What is wrong with him? What is wrong with you? Nothing, I just don't eat meat!

the meaning of my thoughts started to float away from me, like leaves that fall from a tree into a river, I was the tree, the world was the river.

This brings me back to the image of Kafka standing before a fish in the Berlin aquarium, a fish on which his gaze fell in a newly found peace after he decided not to eat animals. Kafka recognized that fish as a member of his invisible family- not as his equal, of course, but as another being that was his concern.

This is the sixty-nine, I told him, presenting the magazine in front of him. I put my fingers -- two of them -- on the action, so that he would not overlook it. Why is it dubbed sixty-nine? he asked, because he is a person hot on fire with curiosity. It was invented in 1969. My friend Gregory knows a friend of the nephew of the inventor. What did people do before 1969? Merely blowjobs and masticating box, but never in chorus.

And so it was when anyone tried to speak: their minds would become tangled in remembrance. Words became floods of thought with no beginning or end, and would drown the speaker before he could reach the life raft of the point he was trying to make. It was impossible to remember what one meant, what, after all of the words, was intended.

Isn't it strange how upset people get about a few dozen baseball players taking growth hormones, when we're doing what were doing to our food animals and feeding them to our children?

My insides don't match up with my outsides. -Do anyone's inside and outsides match up? -I don't know. I'm only me. -Maybe that's what a person's personality is: the difference between the inside and the outside.

Anyway, the fascinating thing was that I read in National Geographic that there are more people alive now than have died in all of human history. In other words, if everyone wanted to play Hamlet at once, they couldn't, because there aren't enough skulls!

I am sure people tell you this constantly but if you looked up 'incredibly beautiful' in the dictionary there would be a picture of you.

We spent our lives making livings.

Almost always when I told someone I was writing a book about eating animals, they assumed, even without knowing anything about my views, that it was a case for vegetarianism. It's a telling assumption, one that implies not only that a thorough inquiry into animal agriculture would lead one away from eating meat, but that most people already know that to be the case.

But I knew the truth and that's why I was so sad. Every moment before this one depends on this one. Everything in the history of the world can be proven wrong in one moment.

People around the world were moving from one place to another. No one was staying.

It's much easier to be cruel than one might think.

This isn't animal experimentation, where you an imagine some proportionate good at the other end of the suffering. This is what we feel like eating. Tell me something: Why is taste, the crudest of our sense, exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other sense? If you stop and think about it, it's crazy. Why doesn't a horny person has as strong a claim to raping an animal as a hungry one does to killing and eating it?

I was of the opinion that the past is past, and like all that is not now it should remain buried along the side of our memories.