Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

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.

It's the tragedy of loving, you can't love anything more than something you miss. (p. 208)

In the end, everyone loses everyone. There was no invention to get around that, and so I felt, that night, like the turtle that everything else in the universe was on top of.

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?

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

The end of suffering does not justify the suffering, and so there is no end to suffering.

She spent the afternoon staring at their front door. "Waiting for someone?" Yankel asked. "What color is this?" He stood very close to the door, letting the end of his nose touch the peephole. He licked the wood and joked, "It certainly tastes like red." "Yes, it is red, isn't it?" "Seems so." She buried her head in her hands. "But couldn’t it be just a bit more red?" (pp. 79-80)

I thought about all of the things that everyone ever says to each other, and how everyone is going to die, whether it's in a millisecond, or days, or months, or 76.5 years, if you were just born. Everything that's born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they're all on fire, and we're all trapped.

"You do not have to present not-truths to me, Sasha. I am not a child."(But I do. That is what you always fail to understand. I present not-truths in order to protect you. That is also why I try so inflexibly to be a funny person. Everything is to protect you. I exist in case you need to be protected.)

It broke my heart into more pieces than my heart was made of, why can't people say what they mean at the time? (p. 279)

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.

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.)

I hope you never love anything as much as I love you. (p. 73)

But more than that, no unloving words were ever spoken, and everything was held up as another small piece of proof that it can be this way, it doesn't have to be that way; if there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it heavy 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 jeweler's felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does.

But I still couldn't figure out what it all meant. The more I found out, the less I understood.