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Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes - Page 10

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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.

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
Love You, Thinking, Most Romantic
Jonathan Safran Foer (2013). “Everything Is Illuminated”, p.234, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Jews have a special relationship to books, and the Haggadah has been translated more widely, and reprinted more often, than any other Jewish book. It is not a work of history or philosophy, not a prayer book, user’s manual, timeline, poem or palimpsest - and yet it is all these things.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Prayer, Philosophy, Book
"New American Haggadah". Book by Jonathan Safran Foer, www.huffingtonpost.com. 2012.

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
Tangled, Remembrance, Mind
Jonathan Safran Foer (2013). “Everything Is Illuminated”, p.261, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Of course food has an important cultural use in families, but there are things that have more important cultural uses in families, and broadening the conversation out simply from what's reasonable also allows in other things.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Important
"Extremely Dead and Incredibly Gross". Interview With Kiera Butler, www.motherjones.com. November 25, 2009.

Art can be very political but that can't be the purpose of art, it can't be the driving force. It isn't with any of the books that I love, anyway.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Art, Book, Political
Source: www.guernicamag.com

Most of the times that I think about my relationship to Judaism, I not only accuse myself of a shallowness, but I feel certain that there's a shallowness there. That's not a bad thing, really.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Thinking, Judaism, Shallowness
"Jonathan Safran Foer On Marriage, Religion And Universal Balances". "Fresh Air", www.npr.org. November 10, 2016.

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

Jonathan Safran Foer
Hands, Silence, Broke
Jonathan Safran Foer (2013). “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel”, p.30, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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
Feelings, Different, Would Be
Interview with Joshua Wolf Shenk, www.motherjones.com. May 2005.

From the movie "Everything is Illuminated" based on a book by Jonathan Safran Foer: I have reflected many times upon our rigid search. 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. Like you say, inside out. Jonathan, in this way, I will always be along the side of your life. And you will always be along the side of mine.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Book, Past, Light

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
People, Tears, World
Source: www.guernicamag.com

When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calendar that showed the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did. Where the smoke from a chimney ended. How an overturned bottle rested at the edge of a table. I spent my life learning to feel less. Every day I felt less. Is that growing old? Or is it something worse? You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Girl, Dog, Sadness
Jonathan Safran Foer (2013). “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel”, p.180, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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
Boots, Matter, Life Is
Jonathan Safran Foer (2013). “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel”, p.86, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

In bed that night I invented a special drain that would be underneath every pillow in New York, and would connect to the reservoir. Whenever people cried themselves to sleep, the tears would all go to the same place, and in the morning the weatherman could report if the water level of the Reservoir of Tears had gone up or down, and you could know if New York is in heavy boots.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Morning, New York, Sleep
Jonathan Safran Foer (2013). “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel”, p.38, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Grandfather informs me that is not possible.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Grandfather
"Everything Is Illuminated". www.imdb.com. 2005.

Sadness of love without release.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Sadness, Release
Jonathan Safran Foer (2013). “Everything Is Illuminated”, p.79, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

I started inventing things, and then I couldn't stop, like beavers, which I know about. People think they cut down trees so they can build dams, but in reality it's because their teeth never stop growing, and if they didn't constantly file them down by cutting through all of those trees, their teeth would start to grow into their own faces, which would kill them. That's how my brain was.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Cutting, Reality, Thinking

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
Hurt, Children, Loss
"Everything Is Illuminated". Book by Jonathan Safran Foer, April 16, 2002.

In the water I saw my father's face, and that face saw the face of its father, and so on, and so on, reflecting backward to the beginning of time, to the face of God, in whose image we were created.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Father, Water, Faces
Jonathan Safran Foer (2013). “Everything Is Illuminated”, p.41, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

I wanted to tell her everything, maybe if I'd been able to, we could have lived differently, maybe I'd be there with you now instead of here. Maybe... if I'd said, 'I'm so afraid of losing something I love that I refuse to love anything,' maybe that would have made the impossible possible. Maybe, but I couldn't do it, I had buried too much too deeply inside me. And here I am, instead of there.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Here I Am, Able, Too Much
Jonathan Safran Foer (2013). “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel”, p.216, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

I asked my schoolmate Mary to write a letter to me. She was funny and full of life. She liked to run around her empty house without any clothes on, even once she was too old for that. Nothing embarrassed her. I admired that so much, because everything embarrassed me, and that hurt me. She loved to jump on her bed. She jumped on her bed for so many years that one afternoon, while I watched her jump, the seams burst. Feathers filled the small room. Our laughter kept the feathers in the air. I thought about birds. Could they fly if there wasn’t someone, somewhere, laughing?

Jonathan Safran Foer
Running, Hurt, Laughter

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.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Running, Dad, Eight
"Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close". www.imdb.com. 2011.

Succotash my cocker spaniel, you fudging crevasse-hole dipshiitake!

Jonathan Safran Foer
Holes, Spaniels
Jonathan Safran Foer (2013). “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel”, p.145, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Find a printer paper and imagine a full-grown bird shaped something like a football with legs standing on it. Imagine 33,000 of these rectangles in a grid. (Broilers are never in cages, and never on multiple levels.) Now enclose the grid with windowless walls and put a ceiling on top. Run in automated (drug-laced) feed, water, heating, and ventilation systems. This is a farm.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Football, Running, Wall
Jonathan Safran Foer (2010). “Eating Animals”, p.112, Penguin UK

He couldn't bear to live, but he couldn't bear to die. He couldn't bear the thought of he making love to someone else, but neither could he bear the absence of the thought. And as for the note, he couldn't bear to keep it, but he couldn't bear to destroy it either.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Making Love, Bears, Absence
Jonathan Safran Foer (2013). “Everything Is Illuminated”, p.45, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

This is the sixty-nine," I told him, presenting the magazine in front of him. I put my fingers -- two of them -- on the action, so that he would not overlook it. "Why is it dubbed sixty-nine?" he asked, because he is a person hot on fire with curiosity. "It was invented in 1969. My friend Gregory knows a friend of the nephew of the inventor." "What did people do before 1969?" "Merely blowjobs and masticating box, but never in chorus.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Fire, Two, People
Jonathan Safran Foer (2013). “Everything Is Illuminated”, p.3, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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