Jonathan Safran Foer

“Oh,' she said. 'I have never seen a Jew before. Can I see his horns?”

“With writing, we have second chances.”

“It is not a thing that you can imagine. It only is. After that, there can be no imagining.”

“Almost always when I told someone I was writing a book about "eating animals", they assumed, even without knowing anything about my views, that it was a case for vegetarianism. It's a telling assumption, one that implies not only that a thorough inquiry into animal agriculture would lead one away from eating meat, but that most people already know that to be the case.”

“Today, it isn't unusual for meat to travel almost halfway around the globe to reach your supermarket. The average distance our meat travels hovers arounf fifteen hundred miles.”

“Anyway, the fascinating thing was that I read in National Geographic that there are more people alive now than have died in all of human history. In other words, if everyone wanted to play Hamlet at once, they couldn’t, because there aren’t enough skulls!”

“Time was passing like a hand waving from a train I wanted to be on. I hope you never have to think about anything as much as I think about you.”

“Chickens can do many things, but they cannot make sophisticated deals with humans.”

“Think of the beginning of the story of the beginning of everything: Adam (without Eve and without divine guidance) names the animals. Continuing his work, we call stupid people bird-brained, cowardly people chickens, fools turkeys. Are these the best names we have to offer? If we can revise the notion of women coming from a rib, can’t we revise our categorizations of the animals that, draped with barbecue sauce, end up as the ribs on our dinner plates — or for that matter, the KFC in our hands?”

“Imagine being served a plate of sushi. But this plate also holds all of the animals that were killed for your serving of sushi. The plate might have to be five feet across.”

“And nothing inspires as much shame as being a parent. Children confront us with our paradoxes and hypocrisies, and we are exposed. You need to find an answer for every why — Why do we do this? Why don’t we do that? — and often there isn’t a good one. So you say, simply, because. Or you tell a story that you know isn’t true. And whether or not your face reddens, you blush. The shame of parenthood — which is a good shame — is that we want our children to be more whole than we are, to have satisfactory answers.”

“And she would say, "Today you believe in God?" And he would say, "Today I believe in love".”

“I bumped into something and was knocked to the ground. It took me several breaths to gather myself together, at first I thought I’d walked into a tree, but then that tree became a person, who was also recovering on the ground, and then I saw that it was her, and she saw that it was me, ‘Hello,’ I said, brushing myself off, ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘This is so funny.’ ‘Yes.’ How could it be explained? ‘Where are you going?’ I asked. ‘Just for a walk,’ she said, ‘and you?’ ‘Just for a walk.’ We helped each other up, she brushed leaves from my hair, I wanted to touch her hair, ‘That’s not true,’ I said, not knowing what the next words out of my mouth would be, but wanting them to be mine, wanting, more than I’d ever wanted anything, to express the center of me and be understood. ‘I was walking to see you.’ I told her, ‘I’ve come to your house each of the last six days. For some reason I needed to see you again.’ She was silent, I had made a fool of myself, there’s nothing wrong with not understanding yourself and she started laughing, laughing harder than I’d ever felt anyone laugh, the laughter brought on tears, and the tears brought on more tears, and then I started laughing, out of the most deep and complete shame, ‘I was walking to you,’ I said again, as if to push my nose into my own shit, ‘because I wanted to see you again,’ she laughed and laughed, ‘That explains it,’ she said when she was able to speak. ‘It?’ ‘That explains why, each of the last six days, you weren’t at your house.’ We stopped laughing, I took the world into me, rearranged it, and sent it back out as a question: ‘Do you like me?”

“I beg you, no matter what happens, no matter where you go in life or how many millions you make, no matter anything, I beg you: never buy a German car. ”

“Money can't buy you happiness, but happiness isn't everything. ”

“I can forgive you for leaving, but not for coming back.”

“He promised us that everything would be okay. I was a child, but I knew that everything would not be okay. That did not make my father a liar. It made him my father.”

“Well, let me leave it at this: if God does exist, He would have a great deal be sad about. And if He doesn’t exist, then that too would make Him quite sad, I imagine. So to answer your question, God must be sad.”

“During the winter much of Yakutia experiences a temperature inversion which results in an unusual phenomena. When the temperature dips below minus 53° Celsius, you can often hear a soft whooshing noise like the sound of grain being poured. It is caused by vapour in one’s own breath turning to ice crystals in the cold, dry air. The local Yakut people call this sound “The Whisper of the Stars.”

“I wanted to cry but I didn't, I probably should have cried, I should have drowned us there in the room ending our suffering.”

“Each day has been chained to the previous one. But the weeks have wings. Anyone who believes that a second is faster than a decade did not live my life.”

“There are only so many times that you can utter ‘It does not hurt’ before it begins to hurt even more than the hurt. You become enlightened of the feeling of feeling hurt, which is worse, I am certain, than the existent hurt.”

“Try to live so that you can always tell the truth.”

“and i wouldn't say no to something sweet.”

“Whether we change our lives or do nothing, we have responded. To do nothing is to do something.”

“Every moment before this one depends on this one.”

“Also, I designed a pretty fascinating bracelet, where you put a rubber band around your favorite book of poems for a year, and then you take it off and wear it.”

“I’d rather somebody hate what I do than be indifferent to it.”

“She had been in love so many times that she began to suspect she was not falling in love, but rather doing something much more ordinary”

“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.”

“I thought about all of the things that everyone ever says to each other, and how everyone is going to die, whether it's in a millisecond, or days, or months, or 76.5 years, if you were just born. Everything that's born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they're all on fire, and we're all trapped.”

“I said, 'I need to know how he died.'He flipped back and pointed at, 'Why?'So I can stop inventing how he died. I'm always inventing.”

“Why didn't he say goodbye?I gave myself a bruise.Why didn't he say 'I love you'?”

“I didn't understand why I needed help, because it seemed to me that you should wear heavy boots when your dad dies, and if you aren't wearing heavy boots, then you need help.”

“I know a lot about birds and bees, but I don't know very much about the birds and the bees. Everything I do know I had to teach myself on the Internet, because I don't have anyone to ask. For example, I know that you give someone a blowjob by putting your penis in their mouth.”

“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.”

“I felt suddenly shy. I was not used to shy. I was used to shame. Shyness is when you turn your head away from something you want. Shame is when you turn your head away from something you do not want.”

“I never confused what I had with what I was.”

“I could tell that Mom was dreaming, but I didn't want to know what she was dreaming about, because I had enough of my own nightmares, and if she had been dreaming something happy, I would have been angry at her for dreaming something happy.”

“There is nothing wrong with compromising. Even if you compromise almost everything.”

“It was the first time I had ever made love. I wondered if he knew that. It felt like crying. I wondered, Why does anyone ever make love?”

“I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love.”

“In the end, everyone loses everyone. There was no invention to get around that, and so I felt, that night, like the turtle that everything else in the universe was on top of.”

“The secret was a hole in the middle of me that every happy thing fell into.”

“Cher Marcel,Allô. I am Oskar's mom. I have thought about it a ton, and I have decided that it isn't obvious why Oskar should go to French lessons, so he will no longer be going to go see you on Sundays like he used to. I want to thank you very much for everything you have taught Oskar, particularly the conditional tense, which is weird. Obviously, there's no need to call me when Oskar doesn't come to his lessons, because I already know, because this was my decision. Also, I will keep sending you checks, because you are a nice guy.Votre ami dévouée,Mademoiselle Schell.”

“I flipped back through the pad of paper while I thought about what Stephen Hawking would do next.”

“You're incredibly beautiful,' I told her, because she was fat, so I thought it would be an especially nice compliment, and also make her like me again, even though I was sexist.”

“Why do beautiful songs make you sad?' 'Because they aren't true.' 'Never?' 'Nothing is beautiful and true.”

“I thought for a minute, and then I got heavy, heavy boots.”

“A few weeks after the worst day, I started writing lots of letters. I don't know why, but it was one of the only things that made my boots lighter.”