Quote

Words are capable of making experience more vivid, and also of organizing it. They can scare us, and they can comfort us.

Jonathan Safran Foer

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Jonathan Safran Foer
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: February 21
Novelist
Writer
Washington
District of Columbia
Making
Experience
Also
Organizing
Vivid
Scare
Comfort
Capable
Words

More quotes by Jonathan Safran Foer

Image
I'm sorry for my inability to let unimportant things go, for my inability to hold on to the important things.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
Our love was the affliction for which only our love was the cure.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
It is not a thing that you can imagine. It only is. After that, there can be no imagining.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
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.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
Every night before putting her to sleep, Yankel counts her ribs, as if one might have disappeared in the course of the day and become the seed and soil for some new companion to steal her away from him.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
I first became a vegetarian when I was nine, in response to an argument made by a radical babysitter. My great change - which lasted a couple of weeks - was based on the very simple instinct that it's wrong to kill animals for food.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
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.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
I wanted to touch him, to tell him that even if everyone left everyone, I would never leave him, he talked and talked, his words fell through him, trying to find the floor to his sadness.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
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
Image
Living on a planet of fixed size requires compromise, and while we are the only party capable of negotiating, we are not the only party at the table. We've never claimed more, and we've never had less.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
Grandfather informs me that is not possible.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
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
Image
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
Image
...people with nothing to declare carry the most.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
I saw Herschel and he saw me and we stood next to each other because that is what friends do in the presence of evil or love.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
It was getting hard to keep all the things I didn't know inside me.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
Stories about food are stories about us-our history and our values.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
I desperately wish I had my tambourine with me now, because even after everything I'm still wearing heavy boots, and sometimes it helps to play a good beat
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
We need a better way to talk about eating animals, a way that doesn't ignore, or even just shruggingly accept things like habits, cravings, family and history, but rather incorporates them into the conversation. The more they are allowed in, the more strongly we will want to follow our best instincts.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
Part of living your life is an awareness of the opportunities that can be missed and an awareness that time moves in one direction.
Jonathan Safran Foer