Jonathan Safran Foer
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.Collection: Sad
If I’d been someone else in a different world I’d've done something different, but I was myself and the world was the world, so I was silent.Collection: Different
Not responding is a response - we are equally responsible for what we don't do.Collection: Food
I think and think and think, I‘ve thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.Collection: Happiness
The only way to overcome sadness is to consume it.Collection: Sadness
...the meaning of my thoughts started to float away from me, like leaves that fall from a tree into a river, I was the tree, the world was the river.Collection: Fall
Just how destructive does a culinary preference have to be before we decide to eat something else? If contributing to the suffering of billions of animals that live miserable lives and (quite often) die in horrific ways isn't motivating, what would be? If being the number one contributor to the most serious threat facing the planet (global warming) isn't enough, what is? And if you are tempted to put off these questions of conscience, to say not now, then when?Collection: Animal
Shyness is when you turn your head away from something you want.Collection: Want
I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love.Collection: One Day
There's nothing wrong with not understanding yourself.Collection: People
It's the tragedy of loving, you can't love anything more than something you miss.Collection: I Hate You
Why are you leaving me? He wrote, I do not know how to live. I do not know either but I am trying. I do not know how to try. There were some things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him. So i buried them and let them hurt meCollection: Hurt
Mom said, "His spirit is there," and that made me really angry. I told her, "Dad didn't have a spirit! He had cells!" "His memory is there." "His memory is here," I said, pointing at my head. "Dad had a spirit," she said, like she was rewinding a bit in our conversation. I told her, "He had cells, and now they're on rooftops, and in the river, and in the lungs of millions of people around New York, who breathe him every time they speak!Collection: Mom
Cruelty...prefers abstraction. Some have tried to resolved this gap by hunting or butchering an animal themselves, as if those experiences might somehow legitimize the endeavor of eating animals. This is very silly. Murdering someone would surely prove that you are capable of killing, but it woudln't be the most reasonable way to understand why you should or shouldn't do it.Collection: Silly
Weeks passed like boats waiting to sail into the starless dawn, we were full of aimless endless darkness.Collection: Bored
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?Collection: Lonely
Oskar Schell: If the sun were to explode, you wouldn't even know about it for 8 minutes because thats how long it takes for light to travel to us. For eight minutes the world would still be bright and it would still feel warm. It was a year since my dad died and I could feel my eight minutes with him... were running out.Collection: Running
But come. No explaining or mending. Be beside me somewhere.Collection: Mending
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.Collection: Animal
I think after you live it's like before you lived.Collection: Thinking
And also, there are so many times when you need to make a quick escape, but humans don't have their own wings, or not yet, anyway, so what about a birdseed shirt?Collection: Wings
Or maybe what he fears is just the opposite: that nobody is looking; that his death, like his life, is without purpose; that there is neither greater good nor evil--only people living and dying because their bodies function and then do not; that the universe is a rip.Collection: Rip
Some make their worlds without knowing it. Their universes are just sesame seeds and three-day weekends and dial tones and skinned knees and physics and driftwood and emerald earrings and books dropped in bathtubs and holes in guitars and plastic and empathy and hardwood and heavy water and high black stockings and the history of the Vikings and brass and obsolescence and burnt hair and collapsed souffles and the impossibility of not falling in love in an art museum with the person standing next to you looking at the same painting and all the other things that just happen and are.Collection: Falling In Love
Which, then, brings us closer to what we want to communicate: saying what we intend, or trying to say the opposite?Collection: Opposites
Grandfather informs me that is not possible.Collection: Grandfather
She spent an 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?Collection: Doors
What do babies dream of? She must be dreaming of the before-life, just as I dream of the afterlife.Collection: Dream
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.Collection: Brother
Was his death an essential stage in the continuation of his life?Collection: Essentials
Or perhaps a widow found him and took him in: brought him an easy chair, changed his sweater every morning, shaved his face until the hair stopped growing, took him faithfully to bed with her every night, whispered sweet nothings into what was left of his ear, laughed with him over black coffee, cried with him over yellowing pictures, talked greenly about having kids of her own, began to miss him before she became sick, left him everything in her will, thought of only him as she died, always knew he was fiction but believed in him anyway.Collection: Sweet
He removed several pages of death certificates, which were picked up by another breeze and sent into the trees. Some would fall with the leaves that September. Some would fall with the trees generations later.Collection: Fall
Sadness of love without release.Collection: Sadness
We are being very nomadic with the truth, yes?Collection: Truthfulness
Grandfather kicked the stop pedal, and my face gave a high-five to the front window.Collection: Grandfather
And nothing inspires as much shame as being a parent. Children confront us with our paradoxes and hypocrisies, and we are exposed. You need to find an answer for every why — Why do we do this? Why don’t we do that? — and often there isn’t a good one. So you say, simply, because. Or you tell a story that you know isn’t true. And whether or not your face reddens, you blush. The shame of parenthood — which is a good shame — is that we want our children to be more whole than we are, to have satisfactory answers.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Mean
Everything is the way it is because everything was the way it wasCollection: Way
Since the world has changed so much, the same values don't lead to the same choices anymore.Collection: Choices
We all choose things, and we also all choose against things. I want to be the kind of person who chooses for more than chooses against.Collection: Want
...and when is enough proof enough?Collection: Enough
For how long could we fail until we surrendered?Collection: Long
[She] always knew he was a fiction but believed in him anyway.Collection: Fiction
If nothing matters, there's nothing to save.Collection: Matter
Our love was the affliction for which only our love was the cure.Collection: Our Love
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.Collection: Trying
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.Collection: Hate
Perhaps in the back of our minds we already understand, without all the science I've discussed, that something terribly wrong is happening. Our sustenance now comes from misery. We know that if someone offers to show us a film on how our meat is produced, it will be a horror film. We perhaps know more than we care to admit, keeping it down in the dark places of our memory-- disavowed. When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own.Collection: Memories
I want an infinitely blank book and the rest of time.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Animal