Jonathan Safran Foer quotes

Jonathan Safran Foer is an American novelist and essayist known for his inventive and emotionally resonant works. His books, such as "Everything Is Illuminated" and "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close," have received critical acclaim and been adapted into films. He often explores themes of family, identity, and trauma in his writing. Here are 311 of his quotes:

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

Parents are always more knowledgeable than their children, and children are always smarter than their parents.

Jonathan Safran Foer

She extended a hand that I didn't know how to take, so I broke its fingers with my silence.

Jonathan Safran Foer

I'm so afraid of losing something I love that I refuse to love anything.

Jonathan Safran Foer

Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.

Jonathan Safran Foer

There were things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him. So I buried them, and let them hurt me.

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

It's always possible to wake someone from sleep, but no amount of noise will wake someone who is pretending to be asleep.

Jonathan Safran Foer

There is nothing wrong with compromising. Even if you compromise almost everything.

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 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?

Jonathan Safran Foer

People who care about animals tend to care about people. They don't care about animals to the exclusion of people. Caring is not a finite resource and, even more than that, it's like a muscle: the more you exercise it, the stronger it gets.

Jonathan Safran Foer

There is an overabundance of rational reasons to say no to factory-farmed meat: It is the No. 1 cause of global warming, it systematically forces tens of billions of animals to suffer in ways that would be illegal if they were dogs, it is a decisive factor in the development of swine and avian flus, and so on.

Jonathan Safran Foer

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.

Jonathan Safran Foer

I never confused what I had with what I was.

Jonathan Safran Foer

The mistakes I've made are dead to me. But I can't take back the things I never did.

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.

Jonathan Safran Foer

I can forgive you for leaving, but not for coming back.

Jonathan Safran Foer

Every moment before this one depends on this one.

Jonathan Safran Foer

Instead of singing in the shower, I would write out the lyrics of my favourite songs, the ink would turn the water blue or red or green, and the music would run down my legs.

Jonathan Safran Foer

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

Jonathan Safran Foer

Words never mean what we want them to mean.

Jonathan Safran Foer