Jonathan Safran Foer

“”

“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.”

“Nine out of ten significant people have to do with money or war!”

“I said, 'I need to know how he died.'”

“Highs and lows make you feel that things matter, but they're nothing.”

“Because sometimes people who seem good”

“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.”

“I used to tuck her … but now she tucked my feelings into the woven arteries of my veins.”

“"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.)”

“Accepting the compromise of the way we have been, the way we are, and the way we will likely be... may we live together in unwavering love and good health, amen.”

“SADNESSES OF THE COVENANT: Sadness of God's love; Sadness of God's back [sic]; Favorite-child sadness; Sadness of b[ein]g sad in front of one's God; Sadness of the opposite of belief [sic]; What if? Sadness; Sadness of God alone in heaven; Sadness of a God who would need people to pray to Him...”

“So many visitors came to rub and kiss different parts of him for the fulfillment of their various wishes that his entire body had to be rebronzed every month. He was a changing god, destroyed and recreated by his believers, destroyed and recreated by their belief... Those who prayed came to believe less and less in the god of their creation and more and more in their belief.”

“It feels like a moment I've lived a thousand times before, as if everything is familiar, right up to the moment of my death, that it will happen again an infinite number of times, that we will meet, marry, have our children, succeed in the ways we have, fail in the ways we have, all exactly the same, always unable to change a thing. I am again at the bottom of an unstoppable wheel, and when I feel my eyes close for death, as they have and will a thousand times, I awake.”

“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)”

“There are worse things, worse than being like us. Look, at least we're alive.”

“My friends are appeased to stay in Odessa for their entire lives. They are appeased to age like their parents, and become parents like their parents. They do not desire anything more than everything they have known.”

“Words never mean what we want them to mean.”

“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. Your great-great-great-children's will be. But we learn to live with that love.”

“"Why do beautiful songs make you sad?" "Because they aren't true." "Never?" "Nothing is beautiful and true." (p. 43)”

“That secret was a hole in the middle of me that every happy thing fell into. (p. 71)”

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

“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. (p. 74)”

“When I was your age, my grandfather bought me a ruby bracelet. It was too big for me and would slide up and down my arm. It was almost a necklace. He later told me that he had asked the jeweler to make it that way. Its size was supposed to be a symbol of his love. More rubies, more love. But I could not wear it comfortably. I could not wear it at all. So here is the point of everything I have been trying to say. If I were to give a bracelet to you, now, I would measure your wrist twice. (p. 79)”

“Humans are the only animal that blushes, laughs, has religion, wages war, and kisses with lips. So in a way, the more you kiss with lips, the more human you are. (p. 99)”

“Sometimes I can feel my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living. (p. 113)”

“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. (p. 130)”

“I felt that night, on the stage, incredibly close to everything in the universe, but also extremely alone. I wondered, for the first time in my life, if life was worth all the work it took to live. What exactly made it worth it? What's so horrible about being dead forever, and not feeling anything, and not even dreaming? What's so great about feeling and dreaming? (p. 145)”

“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! (p. 153)”

“There is nothing wrong with compromising, even if you are compromising almost everything. (p. 175)”

“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.”

“I spent my life learning to feel less.You can not protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.”

“She died in my arms saying, "I don't want to die." That is what death is like. It doesn't matter what uniforms the soldiers are wearing. It doesn't matter how good the weapons are. I thought if everyone could see what I saw, we could never have war anymore. (p. 189)”

“I feel too much. That's what's going on." "Do you think one can feel too much? Or just feel the wrong ways? "My insides don't match up with my outsides." "Do anyone's inside and outsides match up?" "I don't know. I'm only me." "Maybe that's what a person's personality is: the difference between the inside and the outside." "But it's worse for me." "I wonder if everyone thinks it's worse for him." "Probably. But it really is worse for me.”

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

“I'm so afraid of losing something I love, that I refuse to love anything. (p. 216)”

“Time was passing like a hand waving from a train I wanted to be on. I hope you never think about anything as much as I think about you. (p. 224)”

“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)”

“When I heard your organization was recording testimonies, I knew I had to come. She died in my arms, saying 'I don't want to die.' That is what death is like. It doesn't matter what uniforms the soldiers are wearing. It doesn't matter how good the weapons are. I thought if everyone could see what I saw, we would never have war anymore.”

“I wanted to build walls around him, I wanted to separate inside from outside, I wanted to give him an infinitely long blank book and the rest of time. (p. 280)”

“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.”

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

“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 a 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. Your great-great-great-grandchildren's will be. But we learn to live in that love.”

“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?”

“There were things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him, so I buried them, and let them hurt me. (p. 181)”

“He had a wall of masks from every country he‘d been to, like Armenia and Chile and Ethiopia. It‘s not a horrible world, he told me, but it‘s filled with a lot of horrible people.”

“By the standards of the international human rights community, the typical working conditions in America's slaughterhouses constitute human rights violations.”

“Just how destructive does a culinary preference have to be before we decide to eat something else?”

“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.”

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

“Food is not rational. Food is culture, habit, craving and identity.”

“If we were to one day encounter a form of life more powerful and intelligent than our own, and it regarded us as we regard fish, what would be our argument against being eaten?”

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

“She died in my arms, saying, "I don't want to die." That is what death is like. It doesn't matter what uniforms the soldiers are wearing. It doesn't matter how good the weapons are. I thought if everyone could see what I saw, we would never have war anymore.”

“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.”

“That is what death is like. It doesn't matter what uniforms the soldiers are wearing. It doesn't matter how good the weapons are. I thought if everyone could see what I saw, we would never have war anymore.”

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

“From space, astronauts can see people making love as a tiny speck of light. Not light, exactly, but a glow that could be confused for light - a coital radiance that takes generations to pour like honey through the darkness to the astronaut's eyes.”