Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

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.

People care about animals. I believe that. They just don't want to know or to pay. A fourth of all chickens have stress fractures. It's wrong. They're packed body to body, and can't escape their waste, and never see the sun. Their nails grow around the bars of their cages. It's wrong. They feel their slaughters. It's wrong, and people know it's wrong. They don't have to be convinced. They just have to act differently. 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.

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.

When I looked at you, my life made sense. Even the bad things made sense. They were necessary to make you possible.

Does it break my heart, of course, every moment of every day, into more pieces than my heart was made of, I never thought of myself as quiet, much less silent, I never thought about things at all, everything changed, the distance that wedged itself between me and my happiness wasn't the world, it wasn't the bombs and burning buildings, it was me, my thinking, the cancer of never letting go, is ignorance bliss, I don't know, but it's so painful to think, and tell me, what did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever bring me? I think and think and think, I've thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.

[Having learned that Saul had ordered fasting until evening] But Jonathan said, “My father has troubled the land. Look now, how my countenance has brightened because I tasted a little of this honey. How much better if the people had eaten freely today of the spoil of their enemies which they found! For now would there not have been a much greater slaughter among the Philistines?”

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

It's easy to be emotional. You can always make a scene... Highs and lows make you feel that things matter, but they're nothing." "So what's something?" "Being reliable is something. Being good.

I missed you even when I was with you. That’s been my problem. I miss what I already have, and I surround myself with things that are missing.

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.

[To his squire, who had joined him at the Philistines' ambush] Come, let us go over to the garrison of these uncircumcised; it may be that the Lord will work for us. For nothing restrains the Lord from saving by many or by few.

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.

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

The mistakes I've made are dead to me. But I can't take back the things I never did. (p. 309)

The responsibility lies with the mentality of the meat industry that treats both animals and "human capital" like machines ... human beings cannot be human (much less humane) under the conditions of a factory farm or slaughterhouse.