110+ Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes On Education, Friendship And Incredibly Close

Jonathan Safran Foer is an American writer of fiction and non-fiction. He is best known for his novels Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. He is also the author of the non-fiction book Eating Animals, which examines the ethical implications of eating animals. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Jonathan Safran Foer on education, love, friendship.

Top 10 Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

1. You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.
2. Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.
3. 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.
4. His voice was handsome and broken, like a cobblestone street.
5. The sky slowly pulled up its blue dress to reveal night.
6. It has shown me that everything is illuminated in the light of the past. It is always along the side of us...on the inside, looking out.
7. When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own.
8. To feel alone is to be alone.
9. There were things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him. So I buried them, and let them hurt me.
10. It took me as long as I had known him to get rid of all of his words. Like turning an hourglass over.

Jonathan Safran Foer Short Quotes

• They learned to hate her unknowability, her untouchability, the collage of her.
• There's nothing wrong with not understanding yourself.
• She laughed enough to migrate an entire flock of birds. That was how she said yes
• One day you will do things for me that you hate. That is what it means to be family.
• Not responding is a response - we are equally responsible for what we don't do.
• Maybe I'll try to be more patient with morons.
• What were we spending so much time doing if not getting to know each other?
• Shyness is when you turn your head away from something you want.
• We shared the smile of recognizing ourselves in each other.
• I see myself as someone who makes things. Definitions have never done anything but constrain.

Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes About Love

She was a genius of sadness, immersing herself in it, separating its numerous strands, appreciating its subtle nuances. She was a prism through which sadness could be divided into its infinite spectrum. — Jonathan Safran Foer

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. — Jonathan Safran Foer

I dreamt four nights ago of clock hands descending from the universe like rain, of the moon as a green eye, of mirrors and insects, of a love that never withdrew. It was not the feeling of completeness that I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty. — Jonathan Safran Foer

I love sushi, I love fried chicken, I love steak. But there is a limit to my love. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Our love was the affliction for which only our love was the cure. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Food for her is not food, it is terror, dignity, gratitude, vengeance, joyfulness, humiliation, religion, history, and, of course, love. As if the fruit she always offered us were picked from the destroyed brances of out family tree. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Time was passing like a hand waving from a train I wanted to be on. I hope you never have to think about anything as much as I think about you. — Jonathan Safran Foer

[S]o if the device of the person in the ambulance detected the device of the person he loved the most, or the person who loved him the most, and the person in the ambulance was really badly hurt, and might even die, the ambulance could flash GOODBYE! I LOVE YOU! GOODBYE! I LOVE YOU! — Jonathan Safran Foer

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

Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes About Life

No matter how much I feel, I’m not going to let it out. If I have to cry, I’m gonna cry on the inside. If I have to bleed, I’ll bruise. If my heart starts going crazy, I’m not gonna tell everyone in the world about it. It doesn’t help anything. It just makes everyone’s life worse. — Jonathan Safran Foer

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! — Jonathan Safran Foer

It was not the feeling of completeness I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty. — Jonathan Safran Foer

I don't think that there are any limits to how excellent we could make life seem. — Jonathan Safran Foer

I spent my life learning to feel less. — Jonathan Safran Foer

The bruises go away, and so does how you hate, and so does the feeling that everything you receive from life is something you have earned. — Jonathan Safran Foer

She was like a drowning person, flailing, reaching for anything that might save her. Her life was an urgent, desperate struggle to justify her life. — Jonathan Safran Foer

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? — Jonathan Safran Foer

I got incredibly heavy boots about how relatively insignificant life is, and how, compared to the universe and compared to time, it didn’t even matter if I existed at all. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Each day has been chained to the previous one. But the weeks have wings. Anyone who believes that a second is faster than a decade did not live my life. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes About Be Alone

I felt, that night, on that stage, under that skull, incredibly close to everything in the universe, but also extremely alone. — Jonathan Safran Foer

I write because I want to end my loneliness. Books make people less alone. That, before and after everything else, is what books do. They show us that conversations are possible across distances. — Jonathan Safran Foer

We are not long-term beings. Not heroes of romances in many volumes. For one gesture, for one word alone, we shall make the effort. We openly admit: our creations will be temporary. We shall have this as our aim: a gesture. — Jonathan Safran Foer

I was more alone than if I had been alone. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes About Imaginative

Imagine being served a plate of sushi. But this plate also holds all of the animals that were killed for your serving of sushi. The plate might have to be five feet across. — Jonathan Safran Foer

What kind of world would we create if three times a day we activated our compassion and reason as we sat down to eat, if we had the moral imagination and the pragmatic will to change our most fundamental act of consumption? — Jonathan Safran Foer

Well, let me leave it at this: if God does exist, He would have a great deal be sad about. And if He doesn’t exist, then that too would make Him quite sad, I imagine. So to answer your question, God must be sad. — Jonathan Safran Foer

It is not a thing that you can imagine. It only is. After that, there can be no imagining. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Well, what I don't get is why do we exist? I don't mean how, but why.' I watched the fireflies of his thoughts orbit his head. He said, 'we exist because we exist. . .we could imagine all sorts of universes like this one, but this is the one that happened. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Sometimes I imagined stitching all of our little touches together. How many hundreds of thousands of fingers brushing against each other does it take to make love? Why does anyone ever make love? — Jonathan Safran Foer

We could imagine all sorts of universes unlike this one, but this is the one that happened. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes About Illuminated

I am not a bad person. I am a good person who has lived in a bad time." Alex's grandfather..Everything is Illuminated — Jonathan Safran Foer

The only way to overcome sadness is to consume it. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Words never mean what we want them to mean. — Jonathan Safran Foer

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. — Jonathan Safran Foer

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? — Jonathan Safran Foer

The only thing worse than being sad is for others to know you are sad. — Jonathan Safran Foer

She was with me. She did all of those things and so many more, things I would never tell anyone, and she never even loved me. Now that’s love. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes About Hear

And the general shot my sister. I could not look at her, but I remember the sound of when she hit the ground. I hear that sound when things hit the ground still. Anything.' If I could, I would make it so nothing ever hit the ground again. — Jonathan Safran Foer

I said I kicked a French chicken in the stomach once." "Huh?" "It said, 'Oeuf.'" "What is that?" "It's a joke. Do you want to hear another, or have you already had un oeuf? — Jonathan Safran Foer

Once you hear something, you can never return to the time before you heard it. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Because it was starting to get dark, and because the streets were crowded, I bumped into a googolplex people. Who were they? Where were they going? What were they looking for? I wanted to hear their heartbeats, and I wanted them to hear mine. — Jonathan Safran Foer

I realized that your mother couldn't see the emptiness, she couldn't see anything...All of the words I'd written to her over all of those years, had I never said anything to hear at all? — Jonathan Safran Foer

Jonathan Safran Foer Famous Quotes And Sayings

I love you also means I love you more than anyone loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that no one loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that I love no one else, and never have loved anyone else, and never will love anyone else. — Jonathan Safran Foer

We often use technology to save time, but increasingly, it either takes the saved time along with it, or makes the saved time less present, intimate and rich. I worry that the closer the world gets to our fingertips, the further it gets from our hearts. — Jonathan Safran Foer

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. — Jonathan Safran Foer

I will describe my eyes and then begin the story. My eyes are blue and resplendent. Now I will begin the story. — Jonathan Safran Foer

I like to see people reunited, I like to see people run to each other, I like the kissing and the crying, I like the impatience, the stories that the mouth can't tell fast enough, the ears that aren't big enough, the eyes that can't take in all of the change, I like the hugging, the bringing together, the end of missing someone. — Jonathan Safran Foer

We know, at least, that this decision (ending factory farming) will help prevent deforestation, curb global warming, reduce pollution, save oil reserves, lessen the burden on rural America, decrease human rights abuses, improve publish health, and help eliminate the most systematic animal abuse in history. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Do you think I'm wonderful? she asked him one day as they leaned against the trunk of a petrified maple. No, he said. Why? Because so many girls are wonderful. I imagine hundreds of men have called their loves wonderful today, and it's only noon. You couldn't be something that hundreds of others are. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Why do beautiful songs make you sad?' 'Because they aren't true.' 'Never?' 'Nothing is beautiful and true. — Jonathan Safran Foer

We shared the smile of recognizing ourselves in each other, how many imposters do I have? Do we all make the same mistakes, or has one of us gotten it right, or even just a bit less wrong, am I the imposter? — Jonathan Safran Foer

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. — Jonathan Safran Foer

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. — Jonathan Safran Foer

We laughed and laughed, together and separately, out loud and silently, we were determined to ignore whatever needed to be ignored, to build a new world from nothing if nothing in our world could be salvaged, 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. — Jonathan Safran Foer

I have so much to say to you. I want to begin at the beginning, because that is what you deserve. I want to tell you everything, without leaving out a single detail. But where is the beginning? And what is everything? — Jonathan Safran Foer

Thanksgiving is the holiday that encompasses all others. All of them, from Martin Luther King Day to Arbor Day to Christmas to Valentine's Day, are in one way or another about being thankful. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Just to be a functioning adult in the world, we develop all of these layers of protection. When we see homeless people, we don't cry, even though homeless people probably deserve our tears - you know, it's a horrible thing. — 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. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Highs and lows make you feel that things matter, but they're nothing." "So what's something?" "Being reliable is something. Being good. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Not responding is a response--we are equally responsible for what we don't do. In the case of animal slaughter, to throw your hands in the air is to wrap your fingers around a knife handle. — Jonathan Safran Foer

In the morning, when the nothing vase casts a something shadow, like the memory of someone you've lost, what can you say about that? — Jonathan Safran Foer

We believed in our grandmother’s cooking more fervently than we believed in God. — Jonathan Safran Foer

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.) — Jonathan Safran Foer

She wanted more, more slang, more figures of speech, the bee's knees, the cats pajamas, horse of a different color, dog-tired, she wanted to talk like she was born here, like she never came from anywhere else — Jonathan Safran Foer

There's nothing good about being certain about things. And I don't think there's any real talent in using language in a manipulative way, with phrases like "tax relief" or "Social Security reform." It's politically clever, but it's also completely disingenuous, and it's not something to aspire to. — Jonathan Safran Foer

I brought the birdcages to the windows. I opened the windows, and opened the birdcages. I poured the fish down the drain. I took the dogs and cats downstairs and removed their collars. I released the insects onto the street. And the reptiles. And the mice. I told them, Go. All of you. Go. And they went. And they didn’t come back — Jonathan Safran Foer

We spent our lives making livings. — Jonathan Safran Foer

It might sound naive to suggest that whether you order a chicken patty or a veggie burger is a profoundly important decision. Then again, it certainly would have sounded fantastic if in the 1950's you were told that where you sat in a restaurant or on a bus could begin to uproot racism. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Whether we're talking about fish species, pigs, or some other eaten animal, is such suffering the most important thing in the world? Obviously not. But that's not the question. Is it more important that sushi, bacon, or chicken nuggets? That's the question. — Jonathan Safran Foer

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

If there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it 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 jeweller's felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Cruelty depends on an understanding of cruelty, and the ability to choose against it. Or to choose to ignore it. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Factory farming, of course, does not cause all the world's problems, but is is remarkable just how many of them intersect there. — Jonathan Safran Foer

I'm sorry for my inability to let unimportant things go, for my inability to hold on to the important things. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Why didn't he say goodbye? I gave myself a bruise. Why didn't he say 'I love you'? — Jonathan Safran Foer

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

Animal agriculture makes a 40% greater contribution to global warming than all transportation in the world combined; it is the number one cause of climate change. — Jonathan Safran Foer

What's so horrible about being dead forever, and not feeling anything, and not even dreaming? What's so great about feeling and dreaming? — Jonathan Safran Foer

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

There are more obese people in the world than starving people. As China and India start to develop our eating habits - and not by accident but because agribusiness is going over there and imposing our habits on them - if the population doesn't increase at all, we'll have to raise twice as many animals as we do. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Why is taste, the crudest of our senses, exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other senses? — Jonathan Safran Foer

If nothing matters, there's nothing to save. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Ironically, the utterly unselective omnivore -- "I'm easy; I'll eat anything" -- can appear more socially sensitive than the individual who tries to eat in a way that is good for society. — Jonathan Safran Foer

While it is always possible to wake a person who's sleeping, no amount of noise will wake a person who is pretending to be asleep. — Jonathan Safran Foer

A map such as that one is worth many hundreds, and as luck will have it, thousands of dollars. But more than this, it is a remembrance of that time before our planet was so small. When this map was made, I thought, you could live without knowing where you were not living. — Jonathan Safran Foer

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. And the more you wage war. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Sadness of not knowing enough words to [express what you mean]. — Jonathan Safran Foer

My point is that there are a lot of forces, like the media and the general political rhetoric tells us we should have more. That we should do better than our parents and have a bigger house or a better car. — Jonathan Safran Foer

There are still many different ways to get stuck, existentially stuck. Feeling like, "This is worthless. I'm wasting my time, and I would be wasting the time of someone who tried to read this." It happens all the time. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Ninety-nine percent of all land animals eaten or used to produce milk and eggs in the United States are factory farmed. So although there are important exceptions, to speak about eating animals today is to speak about factory farming. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Only humans can cry tears. — Jonathan Safran Foer

How would you judge an artist who mutilated animals in a gallery because it was visually arresting? How riveting would the sound of a tortured animal need to be to make you want to hear it that badly? Try to imagine any end other than taste for which it would be justifiable to do what we do to farmed animals. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Suddenly Yankel was overcome with a fear of dying, stronger than he felt when his parents passed of natural causes, stronger than when his only brother was killed in the flour mill or when his children died, stronger even than when he was a child and it first occurred to him that he must try to understand what it could mean not to be alive -- to be not in darkness, not in unfeeling -- to be not being, not to be. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Everything is to protect you. I exist in case you need to be protected. — Jonathan Safran Foer

It’s hard to say goodbye to the place you’ve lived. It can be as hard as saying goodbye to a person. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Dogs are wonderful, and in many ways unique. But they are remarkably unremarkable in their intellectual and experiential capacities. Pigs are every bit as intelligent and feeling, by any sensible definition of the words. They can't hop into the back of a Volvo, but they can fetch, run and play, be mischievous, and reciprocate affection. So why don't they get to curl up by the fire? Why can't they at least be spared being tossed on the fire? — Jonathan Safran Foer

Weeks passed like boats waiting to sail into the starless dawn, we were full of aimless endless darkness. — Jonathan Safran Foer

It made me start to wonder if there were other people so lonely so close. I thought about “Eleanor Rigby.” It’s true, where do they all come from? And where do they all belong? — Jonathan Safran Foer

Flea-Market vendors are frozen mid-haggle. Middle-aged women are frozen in the middle of their lives. The gavels of frozen judges are frozen between guilt and innocence. On the ground are the crystals of the frozen first breaths of babies, and those of the last gasps of the dying. — Jonathan Safran Foer

I realized I was on a something island. 'How did I get here,' I wondered, surrounded by Nothing, "and how can I get back? — Jonathan Safran Foer

Farmers since the beginning of time have been feeding the world very successfully without systematically abusing animals or destroying the environment. But we're breeding food that is less safe for us, it tastes much worse than it ever has in history, and it's wreaking havoc on the environment in a way that it never did in history before. All in the interest of it being cheap. — Jonathan Safran Foer

There has yet to be a human to survive a span of history without at least one end of the world. — Jonathan Safran Foer

They do not desire anything more than everything they have known. — Jonathan Safran Foer

I regret how much I believed in the future. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Life Lessons by Jonathan Safran Foer

1. Jonathan Safran Foer's work emphasizes the importance of empathy, highlighting the interconnectedness of all living things and the consequences of our actions.
2. His writing often explores themes of identity, memory, and the power of storytelling to shape our understanding of the world.
3. Through his work, Foer encourages us to be mindful of our impact on the environment and to think critically about our relationships with one another.