Quote

Everything else happened - why not the things that could have?

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
Happened
Else
Everything
Things

More quotes by Jonathan Safran Foer

Image
Isn't it strange how upset people get about a few dozen baseball players taking growth hormones, when we're doing what we're doing to our food animals and feeding them to our children?
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
Everything is to protect you. I exist in case you need to be protected.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
The question, I've come to think, is not what inspires one to change, but what inspires one to remain changed.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
Something having been done just about everywhere just about always is no kind of justification for doing it now.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
As a writer, putting words on the page is how I pay attention.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
My point is that there are a lot of forces, like the media and the general political rhetoric tells us we should have more. That we should do better than our parents and have a bigger house or a better car.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
Do you eat chicken because you are familiar with the scientific literature on them and have decided that their suffering doesn't matter, or do you do it because it tastes good?
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
I want an infinitely blank book and the rest of time.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
The dissolution of a family, global crisis creates the massive fracture, not only in the Middle East but between America and Israel, between Europe and Israel, between American Jews and Israeli Jews. The distances seem to be widening wherever you look.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
I started carrying blank books like this one around, which I would fill with all the things I couldn't say.
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
I looked at everyone and wondered where they came from, and who they missed, and what they were sorry for.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
She brushed her eyelashes against his chest.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
It was getting hard to keep all the things I didn't know inside me.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
There are two kinds of sculptures. There's the kind that subtracts: Michelangelo starts with a block of marble and chips away. And then there is the kind that adds, building with clay, piling it on. The way I write novels is to keep piling on and piling on and piling on.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
It can be challenge enough to have to eat with myself.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
We eat as sons and daughters, as families, as communities, as generations, as nations, and increasingly as a globe. We can't stop our eating from radiating influence even if we want to.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
Grandfather informs me that is not possible.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
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
Image
Grandfather kicked the stop pedal, and my face gave a high-five to the front window.
Jonathan Safran Foer