Quote

Cruelty depends on an understanding of cruelty, and the ability to choose against it. Or to choose to ignore it.

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
Cruelty
Depends
Choose
Understanding
Ability
Ignore

More quotes by Jonathan Safran Foer

Image
I see myself as someone who makes things. Definitions have never done anything but constrain.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
I used to think that humor was the only way to appreciate how wonderful and terrible the world is, to celebrate how big life is. But now I think the opposite. Humor is a way of shrinking from that wonderful and terrible world.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
As a writer, putting words on the page is how I pay attention.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
Everyone performs bad actions... A bad person is someone who does not lament his bad actions.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
Flea-Market vendors are frozen mid-haggle. Middle-aged women are frozen in the middle of their lives. The gavels of frozen judges are frozen between guilt and innocence. On the ground are the crystals of the frozen first breaths of babies, and those of the last gasps of the dying.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
I am always sad, I think. Perhaps this signifies that I am not sad at all, because sadness is something lower than your normal disposition, and I am always the same thing. Perhaps I am the only person in the world, then, who never becomes sad. Perhaps I am lucky.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
Words never mean what we want them to mean.
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
Why does watching a dog be a dog fill one with happiness?
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
People hurt each other. That's what people do.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
Can’t you even tell me if I’m on the right track? Buckminster purred, and Dad shrugged his shoulders again. But if you don’t tell me anything, how can I ever be right? He circled something in an article and said, Another way of looking at it would be, how could you ever be wrong?
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
It was terrible. All of the things we couldn't share. The room was filled with conversations we weren't having.
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 saw through the shell of me into the center of me
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
What's so horrible about being dead forever, and not feeling anything, and not even dreaming? What's so great about feeling and dreaming?
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
We were quiet on the car ride home. I turned on the radio and found a station playing Hey Jude. It was true, I didn't want to make it bad. I wanted to take the sad song and make it better. It's just that I didn't know how.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
What does it remember like?
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
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.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Image
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.
Jonathan Safran Foer