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Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes | Quotes said by Jonathan Safran Foer

  • Jonathan Safran Foer Quote #1

    (What are your ghosts like?)
    (They are on the insides of the lids of my eyes.)
    (This is also where my ghosts reside.)
    (You have ghosts?)
    (Of course I have ghosts.)
    (But you are a child.)
    (I am not a child.)
    (But you have not known love.)
    (These are my ghosts, the spaces amid love.)

  • Jonathan Safran Foer Quote #2

    (You do not have to be shamed in my closeness. Family are the people who must never make you feel ashamed.)

    (You are wrong. Family are the people who must make you feel ashamed when you are deserving of shame.)

    (And you are deserving of shame?)

    (I am. I am trying to tell you.) 'We were stupid,' he said, 'because we believed in things.'

    'Why is this stupid?'

    'Because there are not things to believe in.'

    (Love?)

    (There is no love. Only the end of love.)

    (Goodness?)

    (Do not be a fool.)

    (God?)

    (If God exists, He is not to be believed in.)

  • Jonathan Safran Foer Quote #3

    ...and when is enough proof enough?

  • Jonathan Safran Foer Quote #4

    ...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.

  • Jonathan Safran Foer Quote #5

    ...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.

  • Jonathan Safran Foer Quote #6

    ...only someone who'd never been an animal would put up a sign saying not to feed them....

  • Jonathan Safran Foer Quote #7

    SADNESS 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...

  • Jonathan Safran Foer Quote #8

    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.

  • Jonathan Safran Foer Quote #9

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

  • Jonathan Safran Foer Quote #10

    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.

  • Jonathan Safran Foer Quote #11

    A few weeks after the worst day, I started writing lots of letters. I don't know why, but it was one of the only things that made my boots lighter.

  • Jonathan Safran Foer Quote #12

    All that mattered was him looking at me

  • Jonathan Safran Foer Quote #13

    And how can you say I love you to someone you love? I rolled onto my side and fell asleep next to her. Here is the point of everything I have been trying to tell you, Oskar. It's always necessary.

  • Jonathan Safran Foer Quote #14

    And how can you say I love you to someone you love?
    I rolled onto my side and fell asleep next to her.
    Here is the point of everything I have been trying to tell you, Oskar.
    It's always necessary.
    I love you,
    Grandma.

  • Jonathan Safran Foer Quote #15

    AND IF WE ARE TO STRIVE FOR A BETTER FUTURE, MUSTN'T WE BE FAMILIAR AND RECONCILED WITH OUR PAST?

  • Jonathan Safran Foer Quote #16

    And so it was when anyone tried to speak: their minds would become tangled in remembrance. Words became floods of thought with no beginning or end, and would drown the speaker before he could reach the life raft of the point he was trying to make. It was impossible to remember what one meant, what, after all of the words, was intended.

  • Jonathan Safran Foer Quote #17

    And this is what living next to a waterfall is like, Safran. Every widow wakes one morning, perhaps after years of pure and unwavering grieving, to realize she slept a good night's sleep, and will be able to eat breakfast, and doesn't hear her husband's ghost all the time, but only some of the time. Her grief is replaced with useful sadness. Every parent who loses a child finds a way to laugh again. The timbre begins to fade. The edge dulls. The hurt lessens. Every love is carved from loss. Mine was. Yours is. Yor great-great-great-grandchildren's will be. But we learn to live in that love

  • Jonathan Safran Foer Quote #18

    Anyone who believes that a second is faster than a decade did not live life.

  • Jonathan Safran Foer Quote #19

    Anyway.
    I’m not allowed to watch TV, although I am allowed to rent documentaries that are approved for me, and I can read anything I want. My favorite book is A Brief History of Time, even though I haven’t actually finished it, because the math is incredibly hard and Mom isn’t good at helping me. One of my favorite parts is the beginning of the first chapter, where Stephen Hawking tells about a famous scientist who was giving a lecture about how the earth orbits the sun, and the sun orbits the solar system, and whatever. Then a woman in the back of the room raised her hand and said, “What you
    have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back
    of a giant tortoise.” So the scientist asked her what the tortoise was standing
    on. And she said, “But it’s turtles all the way down!”
    I love that story, because it shows how ignorant people can be. And also because I love tortoises.

  • Jonathan Safran Foer Quote #20

    Are you an optimist or a pessimist?
    I can't remember. Which?
    Do you know what those words mean?
    Not really.
    An optimist is positive and hopeful. A pessimist is negative and cynical.
    I'm an optimist.
    Well, that's good, because there’s no irrefutable evidence. There’s nothing that could convince someone who doesn’t want to be convinced. But there is an abundance of clues that would give the wanting believer something to hold on to.

  • Jonathan Safran Foer Quote #21

    As we drove, I imagined we were standing still and the world was coming toward us.

  • Jonathan Safran Foer Quote #22

    August has passed, and yet summer continues by force to grow days. They sprout secretly between the chapters of the year, covertly included between its pages.

  • Jonathan Safran Foer Quote #23

    Because sometimes people who seem good
    end up being not as good as you might have hoped.

  • Jonathan Safran Foer Quote #24

    Before you rush off trying to see everything you can, educate yourself.

  • Jonathan Safran Foer Quote #25

    Being reliable is something. Being good.

  • Jonathan Safran Foer Quote #26

    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.

  • Jonathan Safran Foer Quote #27

    But I knew the truth and that's why I was so sad. Every moment before this one depends on this one. Everything in the history of the world can be proven wrong in one moment.

  • Jonathan Safran Foer Quote #28

    Darling,
    You asked me to write you a letter, so I am writing you a letter. I do not know why I am writing you this letter, or what this letter is supposed to be about, but I am writing it nonetheless, because I love you very much and trust that you have some good purpose for having me write this letter. I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love.
    Your father

  • Jonathan Safran Foer Quote #29

    Deep down, the young are lonelier than the old.' I read that in a book somewhere and it's stuck in my head. Maybe it's true. Maybe it's not true. More likely, the young and the old are lonely in different ways, in their own ways...

  • Jonathan Safran Foer Quote #30

    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?

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