Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes:

We often use technology to save time, but increasingly, it either takes the saved time along with it, or makes the saved time less present, intimate and rich. I worry that the closer the world gets to our fingertips, the further it gets from our hearts.

source: - "Jonathan Safran Foer: technology is diminishing us" by Jonathan Safran Foer, www.theguardian.com. December 3, 2016.

Topics: Heart, Technology, Worry, Fingertips

Our relationship to the environment matters, our relationship to animals matters, and our relationship to culture matters.

Topics: Animal, Culture, Matter

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.

source: - Jonathan Safran Foer (2013). “Everything Is Illuminated”, p.78, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Sad, Lost Love, Grief, Everything Is Illuminated, Prisms

Factory farmers talk about their desire to feed the world. That's not what they're doing. They're feeding the world with really, really cheap stuff.

Topics: Desire, World, Stuff, Feeding The World

You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.

source: - Jonathan Safran Foer (2013). “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel”, p.180, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Happiness, Sad, Believe, Protect Yourself, Deep Happiness

Farmers since the beginning of time have been feeding the world very successfully without systematically abusing animals or destroying the environment. But we're breeding food that is less safe for us, it tastes much worse than it ever has in history, and it's wreaking havoc on the environment in a way that it never did in history before. All in the interest of it being cheap.

Topics: Animal, World, Safe, Havoc, Destroying The Environment

I love you also means I love you more than anyone loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that no one loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that I love no one else, and never have loved anyone else, and never will love anyone else.

source: - Jonathan Safran Foer (2003). “Everything is Illuminated”, p.182, Penguin UK

Topics: Love, Mean, Way, Love You So Much, Amazing Love

You can make great meals without meat that are, of course, much more healthy for the same price, but it takes a process of reeducation, just because Americans aren't familiar with how to cook vegetables anymore.

Topics: Vegetables, Healthy, Meat

Just how destructive does a culinary preference have to be before we decide to eat something else? If contributing to the suffering of billions of animals that live miserable lives and (quite often) die in horrific ways isn't motivating, what would be? If being the number one contributor to the most serious threat facing the planet (global warming) isn't enough, what is? And if you are tempted to put off these questions of conscience, to say not now, then when?

Topics: Animal, Numbers, Suffering, Contributors, Miserable Life

I'm a novelist, I'm not an activist. I'm not a non-fiction writer, I'm not a journalist. I'm not a foodie, I'm not even really an animal person, or an environmentalist. I did the best I could with this, but it's not who I am.

Topics: Animal, Who I Am, Novelists, Non Fiction

Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.

source: - Jonathan Safran Foer (2013). “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel”, p.113, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Life, I Hate You, Weight, Heavy Boots

I put my hand on him. Touching him has always been important to me, it was something I lived for. I never could explain why. Little, nothing touches, my fingers against his shoulder, the outsides of our thighs touching as we squeeled together on the bus. I couldnt explain it, but I needed it. Sometimes I imagined stiching all of our little touches together. How many hundreds of thousands of fingers brushing against each other does it take to make love?

source: - "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close". Book by Jonathan Safran Foer, April 1, 2005.

Topics: Hands, Making Love, Touching

We can't plead ignorance, only indifference. Those alive today are the generations that came to know better. We have the burden and the opportunity of living in the moment when the critique of factory farming broke into the popular consciousness. We are the ones of whom it will be fairly asked, What did you do when you learned the truth about eating animals?

source: - Jonathan Safran Foer (2010). “Eating Animals”, p.208, Penguin UK

Topics: Ignorance, Opportunity, Animal, Eating Animals, Factory Farming

There's nothing wrong with not understanding yourself.

source: - Jonathan Safran Foer (2013). “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel”, p.114, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: People, Understanding, Understanding Yourself

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.

source: - Jonathan Safran Foer (2013). “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel”, p.130, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: I Hate You, Love Is, Emergencies, Flashlights

Whether we change our lives or do nothing, we have responded. To do nothing is to do something.

Songs are as sad as the listener.

Topics: Music, Song, Sadness

Why didn't I learn to treat everything like it was the last time. My greatest regret was how much I believed in the future.

Topics: Life, Regret, Future

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

source: - Jonathan Safran Foer (2013). “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel”, p.181, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Hurt, Buried, Hurt Me

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

source: - Jonathan Safran Foer (2013). “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel”, p.76, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: One Day, Someone You Love

If the thrill of hunting were in the hunt, or even in the marksmanship, a camera would do just as well.

Topics: Hunting, Archery, Cameras, Marksmanship

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

Topics: Family, Hate, Mean, Inspirational Family, Everything Is Illuminated

Consumers are going to have get used to eating less meat - to paying more for better quality meat and eating significantly less of it.

Topics: Quality, Meat, Eating, Eating Less

Few people sufficiently appreciate the colossal task of feeding a world of billions of omnivores who demand meat with their potatoes.

Topics: People, Appreciate, World

Not responding is a response - we are equally responsible for what we don't do.

Topics: Food, Safety, Responsible, Food Safety, Animal Food

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.

Topics: Morning, Memories, Night, Memory Of Someone, Hallways

She let out a laugh, and then she put her hand over her mouth, like she was angry at herself for forgetting her sadness.

Topics: Sadness, Hands, Laughing

Highs and lows make you feel that things matter, but they're nothing." "So what's something?" "Being reliable is something. Being good.

Topics: Matter, Lows, Be Good

Sometimes people who seem good end up being not as good as you might have hoped, you know?

Topics: People, Might, Sometimes

With writing, we have second chances.

Topics: Writing, Second Chance, Chance

I don't think that there are any limits to how excellent we could make life seem.

Topics: Life, Thinking, Limits

The mistakes I've made are dead to me. But I can't take back the things I never did.

Topics: Regret, Mistake, Made

It was one of the best days of my life, a day during which I lived my life and didn't think about my life at all.

Topics: Thinking

The bruises go away, and so does how you hate, and so does the feeling that everything you receive from life is something you have earned.

Topics: Hate, Feelings, Going Away

Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does.

Topics: Doe, Everything Is Illuminated

She laughed enough to migrate an entire flock of birds. That was how she said yes

Topics: Bird, Enough, Flocks, Migrate

Why does watching a dog be a dog fill one with happiness?

Topics: Dog, Doe, Cute Puppy, Puppy Dog

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.

Topics: Running, Missing Someone, Eye, Reunited

I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live.

Topics: Regret, I Regret

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.

source: - "Everything Is Illuminated". Book by Jonathan Safran Foer, 2002.

Topics: Love, Wall, Fall, Knockers, Everything Is Illuminated

It broke my heart into more pieces than my heart was made of, why can't people say what they mean at the time?

source: - Jonathan Safran Foer (2013). “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel”, p.279, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Mean, Heart, People

I never confused what I had with what I was.

Topics: Confused

I felt suddenly shy. I was not used to shy. I was used to shame. Shyness is when you turn your head away from something you want. Shame is when you turn your head away from something you do not want.

source: - Jonathan Safran Foer (2013). “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel”, p.179, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Shy, Want, Shame

Memory was supposed to fill the time, but it made time a hole to be filled.

Topics: Memories, Holes, Made

Food for her is not food, it is terror, dignity, gratitude, vengeance, joyfulness, humiliation, religion, history, and, of course, love. As if the fruit she always offered us were picked from the destroyed brances of out family tree.

Topics: Gratitude, Tree, Fruit, Joyfulness

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?

Topics: Light, People, Razors, Timepieces, Displacement

Not responding is a response--we are equally responsible for what we don't do. In the case of animal slaughter, to throw your hands in the air is to wrap your fingers around a knife handle.

Topics: Animal, Air, Hands, Hands In The Air, Not Responding

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!

Topics: Mean, Doors, People

The more exposure people have to the realities of factory farming, the more we will see people rejecting it. It's already happening.

Topics: Reality, People, Farming, Factory Farming

Am I such a bad person for dreaming of a world that ends when I do? I don't mean the world ending with respect to me, but every set of eyes closing with mine.

Topics: Dream, Eye, Mean

Perhaps in the back of our minds we already understand, without all the science I've discussed, that something terribly wrong is happening. Our sustenance now comes from misery. We know that if someone offers to show us a film on how our meat is produced, it will be a horror film. We perhaps know more than we care to admit, keeping it down in the dark places of our memory-- disavowed. When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own.

Topics: Memories, Dark, Science, Sustenance, Eating Animals

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

Topics: Book, Want, Blank

It's true, I am afraid of dying. I am afraid of the world moving forward without me, of my absence going unnoticed, or worse, being some natural force propelling life on. Is it selfish? Am I such a bad person for dreaming of a world that ends when I do? I don't mean the world ending with respect to me, but every set of eyes closing with mine.

Topics: Death, Dream, Selfish

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

Topics: Losing, Refuse

If we communicated with something like music, we would never be misunderstood, because there is nothing in music to understand.

Topics: Misunderstood

We had everything to say to each other, but no ways to say it

Topics: Way

In the morning, when the nothing vase casts a something shadow, like the memory of someone you've lost, what can you say about that?

Topics: Morning, Memories, Shadow, Memory Of Someone

Words are capable of making experience more vivid, and also of organizing it. They can scare us, and they can comfort us.

source: - "Speechless" by Jonathan Safran Foer, www.newyorker.com. September 12, 2011.

Topics: Scare, Comfort, Vivid

I can't count the times that upon telling someone I am vegetarian, he or she responded by pointing out an inconsistency in my lifestyle or trying to find a flaw in an argument I never made. (I have often felt that my vegetarianism matters more to such people than it does to me.)

Topics: Vegetarianism, People, Trying

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

source: - Jonathan Safran Foer (2013). “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel”, p.208, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: I Hate You, Loving You, Missing

Being with him made my brain quiet. I didn't have to invent a thing.

Topics: Brain, Quiet, Made

Let love write on you for awhile.

Topics: Writing

One hundred years of joy can be erased in one second

Topics: Years, Joy, Hundred

Do you think I'm wonderful? she asked him one day as they leaned against the trunk of a petrified maple. No, he said. Why? Because so many girls are wonderful. I imagine hundreds of men have called their loves wonderful today, and it's only noon. You couldn't be something that hundreds of others are.

Topics: Girl, Men, Thinking, Everything Is Illuminated

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.

Topics: Eye, Long, Bird, Anemia, Respiratory

It was not the feeling of completeness I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty.

Topics: Life, Feelings, Emptiness, Completeness

...people with nothing to declare carry the most.

source: - Jonathan Safran Foer (2013). “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel”, p.268, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Struggle, People

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

Topics: Stories, Mets, Life Story

Do you eat chicken because you are familiar with the scientific literature on them and have decided that their suffering doesn't matter, or do you do it because it tastes good?

Topics: Suffering, Literature, Matter

I love sushi, I love fried chicken, I love steak. But there is a limit to my love,

Topics: Sushi, Limits, Steak

Humans are the only animals that have children on purpose, keep in touch (or don't), care about birthdays, waste and lose time, brush their teeth, feel nostalgia, scrub stains, have religions and political parties and laws, wear keepsakes, apologize years after an offense, whisper, fear themselves, interpret dreams, hide their genitalia, shave, bury time capsules, and can choose not to eat something for reasons of conscience. The justifications for eating animals and for not eating them are often identical: we are not them.

Topics: Dream, Children, Party, Keepsakes, Time Capsules

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?

Topics: Hate, Absence, Everything Is Illuminated

I'm grateful for anything that reminds me of what's possible in this life. Books can do that. Films can do that. Music can do that. School can do that. It's so easy to allow one day to simply follow into the next, but every once in a while we encounter something that shows us that anything is possible, that dramatic change is possible, that something new can be made, that laughter can be shared.

Topics: Laughter, Book, Grateful, Dramatic Change

The only way to overcome sadness is to consume it.

Topics: Sadness, Overcoming, Way, Everything Is Illuminated

Words never mean what we want them to mean.

Topics: Mean, Want, Language, Everything Is Illuminated

You are the only one who has understood even a whisper of me, and I will tell you that I am the only person who has understood even a whisper of you.

Topics: Understood, Persons

I imagine a line, a white line, painted on the sand and on the ocean, from me to you.

Topics: Long Distance Relationship, Ocean, White, Everything Is Illuminated, Inspiring Long Distance Relationship

A map such as that one is worth many hundreds, and as luck will have it, thousands of dollars. But more than this, it is a remembrance of that time before our planet was so small. When this map was made, I thought, you could live without knowing where you were not living.

Topics: Knowing, Remembrance, Luck

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

Topics: Want, Shyness, Turns

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

Topics: Sorry, Important, Inability, Unimportant Things

When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own.

Topics: Meat, Flesh, Becoming

Thanksgiving is the holiday that encompasses all others. All of them, from Martin Luther King Day to Arbor Day to Christmas to Valentine's Day, are in one way or another about being thankful.

Topics: Thanksgiving, Kings, Valentine, Arbor Day, Arbors

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

Topics: Dog, Cat, Animal

Cruelty depends on an understanding of cruelty, and the ability to choose against it. Or to choose to ignore it.

Topics: Understanding, Cruelty, Ability, Ability To Choose

Feeding my children is not like feeding myself: it matters more.

Topics: Children, Matter, My Children

The more you love someone, he came to think, the harder it is to tell them. It surprised him that strangers didn't stop each other on the street to say I love you.

Topics: Love You, Thinking, Most Romantic, Everything Is Illuminated

We live in a world made up more of story than stuff. We are creatures of memory more than reminders, of love more than likes.

Topics: Memories, Stories, World

I looked at everyone and wondered where they came from, and who they missed, and what they were sorry for.

Topics: Sorry

I think and think and think, I‘ve thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.

Topics: Happiness, Positivity, Thinking

I have so much to say to you. I want to begin at the beginning, because that is what you deserve. I want to tell you everything, without leaving out a single detail. But where is the beginning? And what is everything?

source: - Jonathan Safran Foer (2013). “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel”, p.75, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Leaving, Details, Want

My wife and I have chosen to bring up our children as vegetarians. In another time or place, we might have made a different decision. But the realities of our present moment compelled us to make that choice.

Topics: Children, Reality, Wife, Another Time

Dogs are wonderful, and in many ways unique. But they are remarkably unremarkable in their intellectual and experiential capacities. Pigs are every bit as intelligent and feeling, by any sensible definition of the words. They can't hop into the back of a Volvo, but they can fetch, run and play, be mischievous, and reciprocate affection. So why don't they get to curl up by the fire? Why can't they at least be spared being tossed on the fire?

Topics: Running, Dog, Intelligent, Reciprocate, Mischievous

He promised us that everything would be okay. I was a child, but I knew that everything would not be okay. That did not make my father a liar. It made him my father.

Topics: Children, Father, Liars

Why are entire flocks of industrial birds dying at once? And what about the people eating those birds? Just the other day, one of the local pediatricians was telling me he's seeing all kinds of illnesses that he never used to see. Not only juvenile diabetes, but inflammatory and autoimmune diseases that a lot of the docs don't even know what to call. And girls are going through puberty much earlier; and kids are allergic to just about everything, and asthma is out of control. Everyone knows it's our foods... Kids today are the first generation to grow up on this stuff...

Topics: Girl, Growing Up, Kids, Juvenile Diabetes, Pediatrician

Why is taste, the crudest of our senses, exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other senses?

Topics: Taste, Ethical, Animal Experimentation

We laughed and laughed, together and separately, out loud and silently, we were determined to ignore whatever needed to be ignored, to build a new world from nothing if nothing in our world could be salvaged, it was one of the best days of my life, a day during which I lived my life and didn't think about my life at all.

Topics: Thinking, Our World, Together

Ninety-nine percent of all land animals eaten or used to produce milk and eggs in the United States are factory farmed. So although there are important exceptions, to speak about eating animals today is to speak about factory farming.

Topics: Animal, Land, Eggs, Factory Farming

Brod discovered 613 sadnesses, each perfectly unique, each a singular emotion, no more similar to any other sadness than to anger, ecstasy, guilt, or frustration. Mirror Sadness. Sadness of Domesticated Birds. Sadness of Being Sad in front of One's Parent. Humor Sadness. Sadness of Love Without Release.

Topics: Sadness, Frustration, Unique

I spent my life learning to feel less.

Topics: Life Learning, Feels, Everything Is Illuminated

I always write out of a need to read something, rather than a need to write something.

Topics: Writing, Needs

We talked about nothing in particular, but it felt like we were talking about the most important things...

Topics: Talking, Important, Particular

For a long time, I thought I would like to be a doctor. Such a good profession. So explicitly good. Never a waste of time.

Topics: Doctors, Long, Waste

Fiction works when it makes a reader feel something strongly.

Topics: Fiction, Reader, Feels

Murdering someone would surely prove that you are capable of killing, but it wouldn't be the most reasonable way to understand why you shouldn't do it.

Topics: Way, Vegan, Killing

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?

Topics: War, Animal, Choices, Eating Animals

Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?

Topics: Growing, Growing Old

I love the idea of books being more than books, or being, rather, something other than books.

Topics: Book, Ideas

We are breeding creatures incapable of surviving in any place other than the most artificial settings. We have focused the awesome power of modern genetic knowledge to bring into being animals that suffer more.

Topics: Animal, Suffering, Modern

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?

Topics: Baseball, Children, Player, Growth Hormones

SADNESSES OF THE INTELLECT: Sadness of being misunderstood [sic]; Humor sadness; Sadness of love wit[hou]t release; Sadne[ss of be]ing smart; Sadness of not knowing enough words to [express what you mean]; Sadness of having options; Sadness of wanting sadness; Sadness of confusion; Sadness of domes[tic]ated birds; Sadness of fini[shi]ng a book; Sadness of remembering; Sadness of forgetting; Anxiety sadness...

Topics: Life, Smart, Book, Tics, Being Misunderstood

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.

Topics: Memories, Book, Law, Jewish Law, Torah

Be the instrument playing the sound of your life's passing

Topics: Fearless, Sound, Passing

My dream went all the way back to the beginning. The rain rose into the clouds, and the animals descended the ramp.

Topics: Dream, Rain, Animal, Ramp

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

Topics: Moving, People, World

Animal agriculture makes a 40% greater contribution to global warming than all transportation in the world combined; it is the number one cause of climate change.

Topics: Animal, Numbers, Agriculture, Eating Animals, Animal Agriculture

How would you judge an artist who mutilated animals in a gallery because it was visually arresting? How riveting would the sound of a tortured animal need to be to make you want to hear it that badly? Try to imagine any end other than taste for which it would be justifiable to do what we do to farmed animals.

Topics: Artist, Animal, Judging, Arresting

Everyone is always in need of something that another person can give, be it undivided attention, a kind word or deep empathy. There is no better use of a life than to be attentive to such needs.

Topics: Giving, Empathy, Needs, Undivided Attention

He couldn't bear to live, but he couldn't bear to die. He couldn't bear the thought of he making love to someone else, but neither could he bear the absence of the thought. And as for the note, he couldn't bear to keep it, but he couldn't bear to destroy it either.

Topics: Making Love, Bears, Absence

In truth I was manufacturing a brick wall of shits.

Topics: Wall, Bricks, Brick Wall

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.

Topics: Hero, Long, Romance

Language is never fully trustworthy, but when it comes to eating animals, words are as often used to misdirect and camouflage as they are to communicate. Some words, like veal, help us forget what we are actually talking about. Some, like free-range, can mislead those whose consciences seek clarification. Some, like happy, mean the opposite of what they would seem. And some, like natural, mean next to nothing.

Topics: Mean, Animal, Talking, Clarification

We spent our lives making livings.

Literature was the only religion her father practiced, when a book fell on the floor he kissed it, when he was done with a book he tried to give it away to someone who would love it.

Topics: Father, Book, Giving

We live in a world made up more of story than stuff. We are creatures of memory more than reminders, of love more than likes. Being attentive to the needs of others might not be the point of life, but it is the work of life. It can be messy, and painful, and almost impossibly difficult. But it is not something we give. It is what we get in exchange for having to die.

Topics: Memories, Giving, Needs

Flea-Market vendors are frozen mid-haggle. Middle-aged women are frozen in the middle of their lives. The gavels of frozen judges are frozen between guilt and innocence. On the ground are the crystals of the frozen first breaths of babies, and those of the last gasps of the dying.

Topics: Baby, Judging, Guilt, Vendors, Gavel

The paper, the stapler, the staples, the tape. It makes me sick. Physical things. Forty years of loving someone becomes staples and tape.

Topics: Years, Loving Someone, Sick, Physical Things

But when, at the end of my sophomore year, I became a philosophy major and started doing my first seriously pretentious thinking, I became a vegetarian again. The kind of willful forgetting that I was sure meat eating required felt too paradoxical to the intellectual life I was trying to shape. I thought life could, should, and must conform to the mold of reason. You can imagine how annoying this made me.

Topics: Philosophy, Thinking, Years, Sophomore Year, Meat Eating

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...

Topics: Want, Kind, Persons

And the general shot my sister. I could not look at her, but I remember the sound of when she hit the ground. I hear that sound when things hit the ground still. Anything.' If I could, I would make it so nothing ever hit the ground again.

Topics: Sound, Looks, Remember

We know it (meat eating) is indisputably the number one cause of global warming. So what does it mean exactly to be an environmentalist on a daily basis if you are not thinking about the number one cause of global warming or one of the top two or three causes of all other environmental problems? Does it mean you are necessarily someone who doesn't care about the environment? Obviously not, but it might mean you have a blind spot for something big.

Topics: Mean, Thinking, Numbers, Meat Eating, Blind Spots

Elsewhere the paper notes that vegetarians and vegans (including athletes) 'meet and exceed requirements' for protein. And, to render the whole we-should-worry-about-getting-enough-protein-and-therefore-eat-meat idea even more useless, other data suggests that excess animal protein intake is linked with osteoporosis, kidney disease, calcium stones in the urinary tract, and some cancers. Despite some persistent confusion, it is clear that vegetarians and vegans tend to have more optimal protein consumption than omnivores.

Topics: Cancer, Food, Athlete, Meat Consumption, Meat Industry

...Food serves two parallel purposes: it nourishes and it helps you remember. Eating and storytelling are inseparable-the saltwater is also tears; the honey not only tastes sweet, but makes us think of sweetness; the matzo is the bread of our affliction.

Topics: Sweet, Thinking, Two

I realized I was on a something island. 'How did I get here,' I wondered, surrounded by Nothing, "and how can I get back?

Topics: Islands, I Realized

She wanted more, more slang, more figures of speech, the bee's knees, the cats pajamas, horse of a different color, dog-tired, she wanted to talk like she was born here, like she never came from anywhere else

Topics: Dog, Horse, Cat, Figures Of Speech

Stories about food are stories about us-our history and our values.

Topics: Stories, Values

Chickens can do many things, but they cannot make sophisticated deals with humans.

Topics: Sophisticated, Chickens, Deals

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.

Topics: Love, Pain, Thinking, Time Passing

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.

Topics: Book, Writing, Animal, Eating Meat, Eating Animals

Whether we're talking about fish species, pigs, or some other eaten animal, is such suffering the most important thing in the world? Obviously not. But that's not the question. Is it more important that sushi, bacon, or chicken nuggets? That's the question.

Topics: Animal, Talking, Pigs, Chicken Nuggets

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?

source: - Jonathan Safran Foer (2013). “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel”, p.119, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Mistake, Same Mistakes, Imposter

A few days after we came home from the hospital, I sent a letter to a friend, including a photo of my son and some first impressions of fatherhood. He responded, simply, 'Everything is possible again.' It was the perfect thing to write, because that was exactly how it felt. We could retell our stories and make them better, more representative or aspirational. Or we could choose to tell different stories. The world itself had another chance.

Topics: Home, Writing, Son, Perfect Things

Instead of singing in the shower, I would write out the lyrics of my favourite songs, the ink would turn the water blue or red or green, and the music would run down my legs.

Topics: Running, Song, Writing, Favourite Songs, Singing In The Shower

Jed Perl writes precisely and ecstatically. Antoine' s Alphabet is a history and a fairy tale, a work of criticism, and a work of art.

Topics: Art, Writing, Criticism, Perl

When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much.

Topics: Girl, Dog, Stranger, Where You Grew Up

I've never particularly liked bankers.

Topics: Bankers

I'm not funny. People assume that because my books are funny, I'll be funny in real life. It's the inevitable disappointment of meeting me.

Topics: Disappointment, Real, Book, Funny People

I see myself as someone who makes things. Definitions have never done anything but constrain.

Topics: Done, Definitions, Constrain

...and when is enough proof enough?

Topics: Enough, Proof

I thought, it's a shame that we have to live, but it's a tragedy that we get to live only one life, because if I'd had two lives, I would have spent one of them with her.

Topics: Two, Tragedy, Shame, Two Lives

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

Topics: Order, Sometimes

Only humans can cry tears.

Topics: Tears, Cry, Humans, Cry Tears

I watched the sheets breathe when she breathed, like how Dad used to say that trees inhale when people exhale, because I was too young to understand the truth about biological processes.

Topics: Dad, People, Tree

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.

Topics: Thinking, Opposites, Appreciate

I realized that your mother couldn't see the emptiness, she couldn't see anything...All of the words I'd written to her over all of those years, had I never said anything to hear at all?

Topics: Mother, Years, Emptiness

I hated myself for going, why couldn't I be the kind of person who stays?

Topics: Kind, Hated, Persons

The writing itself is no big deal. The editing, and even more than that, the self-doubt, is excruciatingly impossible.

Topics: Writing, Editing, Self

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.

Topics: Animal, Aquariums, Berlin

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

Topics: Prayer, Memories

Profound, bottomless self-doubt - it has no value - what's the point? In a way, it takes up as much time as anything else.

Topics: Self, Profound, Doubt

I write because I want to end my loneliness. Books make people less alone. That, before and after everything else, is what books do. They show us that conversations are possible across distances.

Topics: Distance, Loneliness, Book, Before And After

I am always sad, I think. Perhaps this signifies that I am not sad at all, because sadness is something lower than your normal disposition, and I am always the same thing. Perhaps I am the only person in the world, then, who never becomes sad. Perhaps I am lucky.

Topics: Sad, Thinking, Normal

[She] always knew he was a fiction but believed in him anyway.

Topics: Fiction

I need an office, so I can have a place where I don't write.

Topics: Writing, Office, Needs

Our love was the affliction for which only our love was the cure.

Topics: Affliction, Our Love, Cures, Everything Is Illuminated

What were we spending so much time doing if not getting to know each other?

Topics: Spending, Getting To Know Each Other

It might sound naive to suggest that whether you order a chicken patty or a veggie burger is a profoundly important decision. Then again, it certainly would have sounded fantastic if in the 1950's you were told that where you sat in a restaurant or on a bus could begin to uproot racism.

Topics: Order, Racism, Decision

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

Topics: Done, Sickness

I kept thinking how they were all names of dead people, and how names are basically the only thing dead people keep.

Topics: Thinking, Names, People, Dead People

If it had and answer, it wouldn't really be love, would it?

Topics: Answers

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

Topics: War, Night, Boredom, Lost Cause

How did her life live itself without her.

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.

Topics: Stones, Empty, Pitcher

In the end, everyone loses everyone. There was no invention to get around that.

Topics: Invention, Ends

It shouldn't be the consumer's responsibility to figure out what's cruel and what's kind, what's environmentally destructive and what's sustainable. Cruel and destructive food products should be illegal. We don't need the option of buying children's toys made with lead paint, or aerosols with chlorofluorocarbons, or medicines with unlabeled side effects. And we don't need the option of buying factory-farmed animals.

Topics: Children, Responsibility, Animal

Years were passing through the spaces between moments.

Topics: Years, Space, Moments

It was terrible. All of the things we couldn't share. The room was filled with conversations we weren't having.

Topics: Rooms, Share, Conversation

I felt shame for living in a nation of unprecedented prosperity-a nation that spends a smaller percentage of income on food than any other civilization has in human history-but in the name of affordability treats the animals it eats with cruelty so extreme it would be illegal if inflicted on a dog.

Topics: Dog, Animal, Civilization, Affordability, Human History

She felt as if she were brimming, always producing and hoarding more love inside her. But there was no release.

Topics: Hoarding, Release

[...]It is as if after surviving so much, there was no longer reason to survive.

Topics: Reason, Surviving

She repeats things until they are true, or until she can't tell whether they are true or not. She has become an expert at confusing what is with what was with what should be with what could be.

Topics: Confusing, Experts, Should

I wanted to protect him, which I was sure I could do, even if I could not protect myself.

Topics: Protect, Wanted

Nothing is beautiful and true.

Topics: Beautiful

Sometimes one simply wants to disappear.

Topics: Want, Sometimes, Disappear

I felt, that night, on that stage, under that skull, incredibly close to everything in the universe, but also extremely alone.

Topics: Night, Skulls, Stage

Compassion is a muscle that gets stronger with use, and the regular exercise of choosing kindness over cruelty would change us.

Topics: Kindness, Exercise, Compassion, Regular Exercise

She was not crying Which surprised me very much But I understand now That she had found places For her melancholy That were behind more masks Than only her eyes

Topics: Eye, Cry, Melancholy

What is suffering? I'm not sure what it is, but I know that suffering is the name we give to the origin of all the sighs, screams, and groans — small and large, crude and multifaceted — that concern us. The word defines our gaze even more than what we are looking at.

Topics: Names, Giving, Suffering

We shared the smile of recognizing ourselves in each other.

Topics: Recognizing

Time was passing like a hand waving from a train that I wanted to be on.

Topics: Hands, Time Passing, Wanted

She extended a hand that I didn't know how to take, so I broke its fingers with my silence.

Topics: Hands, Silence, Broke

The UN special envoy on food called it a 'crime against humanity' to funnel 100 million tons of grain and corn to ethanol when almost a billion people are starving. So what kind of crime is animal agriculture, which uses 756 million tons of grain and corn per year, much more than enough to adequately feed the 1.4 billion human who are living in dire poverty?

Topics: Animal, Years, Agriculture, Ethanol, Animal Agriculture

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

Topics: Want

It is my great hope that our paths, however long and winding, will cross again.

Topics: Long, Path, Crosses

Dear Anna, we will live in a home with no walls, so that everywhere we go will be our home.

Topics: Wall, Home, Anna

Weeks passed like boats waiting to sail into the starless dawn, we were full of aimless endless darkness.

Topics: Bored, Waiting, Darkness

I made up my mind that nothing,, nothing was going to stop me Not even me.

Topics: Mind, Made

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 ***** person has as strong a claim to raping an animal as a hungry one does to killing and eating it?

Topics: Strong, Crazy, Thinking, Animal Experimentation

I don't mind if smiles come at my expense, I'm a small price to pay.

Topics: Mind, Pay, Pun

I'm not better than anyone, and I'm not trying to convince people to live by my standards of what's right. I'm trying to convince them to live by their own.

Topics: People, Trying, Standards

I wouldn't want a boy to think I was pretty unless he was the kind of boy who thought I was pretty.

Topics: Boys, Thinking, Want