Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

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.

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.

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

Brod's life was a slow realization that the world was not for her, and that for whatever reason, she would never be happy and honest at the same time. She felt as if she were brimming, always producing and hoarding more love inside her. But there was no release...

So she had to satisfy herself with the idea of love — loving the loving of things whose existence she didn't care at all about. Love itself became the object of her love. She loved herself in love, she loved loving love, as love loves loving, and was able, in that way, to reconcile herself with a world that fell so short of what she would have hoped for. It was not the world that was the great and saving lie, but her willingness to make it beautiful and fair, to live a once-removed life, in a world once-removed from the one in which everyone else seemed to exist.

Mom told me, “It probably gets pretty lonely to be Grandma, don’t you think?” I told her, “It probably gets pretty lonely to be anyone.

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.

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.)

The only way to overcome sadness is to consume it.

I wanted to cry but I didn't, I probably should have cried, I should have drowned us there in the room ending our suffering.

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

She has become an expert at confusing what is with what was with what should be with what could be.

I hope you never think about anything as much as I think about you.

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

There's nothing wrong with not understanding yourself.

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.