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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
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Jonathan Safran Foer
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: February 21
Novelist
Writer
Washington
District of Columbia
Response
Slaughter
Responsible
Responding
Case
Knife
Air
Knives
Cases
Equally
Animal
Throw
Hands
Handle
Wrap
Around
Fingers
Wraps
More quotes by Jonathan Safran Foer
Only humans can cry tears.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Just about every children's book in my local bookstore has an animal for its hero. But then, only a few feet away in the cookbook section, just about every cookbook includes recipes for cooking animals. Is there a more illuminating illustration of our paradoxical relationship with the nonhuman world?
Jonathan Safran Foer
My dream went all the way back to the beginning. The rain rose into the clouds, and the animals descended the ramp.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Compassion is a muscle that gets stronger with use, and the regular exercise of choosing kindness over cruelty would change us.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Oh, I'd say I like a meal as much as anybody. But I find a certain kind of foodiness silly, gluttonous and embarrassing.
Jonathan Safran Foer
If we are not given the option to live without violence, we are given the choice to center our meals around harvest or slaughter, husbandry or war. We have chosen slaughter. We have chosen war. That's the truest version of our story of eating animals. Can we tell a new story?
Jonathan Safran Foer
Why do I write? It's not that I want people to think I am smart, or even that I am a good writer. I write because I want to end my loneliness.
Jonathan Safran Foer
September 11 had such a strong visual component, the most visually documented event in human history. Nothing's ever been seen by as many people as that was. Our experiences of the day, our memories of the day are just so tied up in images of buildings falling and bodies falling.
Jonathan Safran Foer
I'm so afraid of losing something I love that I refuse to love anything
Jonathan Safran Foer
Food is not rational. Food is culture, habit, and identity.
Jonathan Safran Foer
This brings me back to the image of Kafka standing before a fish in the Berlin aquarium, a fish on which his gaze fell in a newly found peace after he decided not to eat animals. Kafka recognized that fish as a member of his invisible family- not as his equal, of course, but as another being that was his concern.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Even if I don't like what I am, I know what I am. My children like what they are, but they don't know what they are. So tell me which is worse.
Jonathan Safran Foer
As a writer, putting words on the page is how I pay attention.
Jonathan Safran Foer
But what she was really trying to say was this: I like music better than anything in the world, after you.
Jonathan Safran Foer
It’s a rule that we never listen to sad music, we made that rule early on, songs are as sad as the listener, we hardly ever listen to music.
Jonathan Safran Foer
If we communicated with something like music, we would never be misunderstood, because there is nothing in music to understand...... But until we find this new way of speaking, until we can find a nonapproximate vocabulary, nonsense words are the best thing we've got. Ifactifice is one such word.
Jonathan Safran Foer
The secret was a hole in the middle of me that every happy thing fell into.
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
Cruelty depends on an understanding of cruelty, and the ability to choose against it. Or to choose to ignore it.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Only now do I understand the war against boredom, the lost cause of empty hours, of empty days and nights.
Jonathan Safran Foer
