Quotes from Jonathan Safran Foer

Choosing leaf or flesh, factory farm or family farm, does not in itself change the world, but teaching ourselves, our children, our local communities, and our nation to choose conscience over ease can.

What? she said once to herself, and then once aloud, What? She felt a total displacement, like a spinning globe brought to a sudden halt by the light touch of a finger. How did she end up here, like this? How could there have been so much - so many moments, so many people and things, so many razors and pillows, timepieces and subtle coffins - without her being aware? How did her life live itself without her?

She maintained a careful balance by her window, never allowing the men to come too close, never allowing them to stray too far.

She was with me. She did all of those things and so many more, things I would never tell anyone, and she never even loved me. Now that's love.

How beautiful is forgetting! What relief it would be for the world to lose some of its contents.

Good people don't make fewer mistakes, they're just better at apologizing.

For how long could we fail until we surrendered?

We could imagine all sorts of universes unlike this one, but this is the one that happened.

You can call your turkey organic and torture it daily.

Sometimes one simply wants to disappear.

We shared the smile of recognizing ourselves in each other, how many imposters do I have? Do we all make the same mistakes, or has one of us gotten it right, or even just a bit less wrong, am I the imposter?

And here I am, instead of there. I'm sitting in this library, thousands of miles from my life, writing another letter I know I won't be able to send, no matter how hard I try and how much I want to. How did that boy making love behind that shed become this man writing this letter at this table?

We are not long-term beings. Not heroes of romances in many volumes. For one gesture, for one word alone, we shall make the effort. We openly admit: our creations will be temporary. We shall have this as our aim: a gesture.

I thought for a minute, and then I got heavy, heavy boots.

Everything I did, I did because I thought it was the correct thing to do… I am not a hero, it is true… But I am not a bad person, either.

Memories are small prayers to God, if we believed in that sort of thing.

I'd rather somebody hate what I do than be indifferent to it.

I'm so afraid of losing something I love that I refuse to love anything,' maybe that would have made the impossible possible. Maybe, but I couldn't do it, I had buried too much too deeply inside me. And here I am, instead of there.

Our stories are so fundamental to us that it's easy to forget that we choose them.

Oskar Schell: If the sun were to explode, you wouldn't even know about it for 8 minutes because thats how long it takes for light to travel to us. For eight minutes the world would still be bright and it would still feel warm. It was a year since my dad died and I could feel my eight minutes with him... were running out.

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

I didn't feel empty. I wished I'd felt empty. ... I wanted to be empty like an overturned pitcher. But I was full like a stone.

He was someone whom everyone admired and liked but whom nobody knew. He was like a book that you could feel good holding, that you could talk about without ever having read, that you could recommend.

Only a few months into our marriage, writes the grandfather, we started marking off areas in the apartment as 'Nothing Places,' in which one could be assured of complete privacy, we agreed that we never would look at the marked-off zones, that they would be nonexistent territories in the apartment in which one could temporarily cease to exist.