Jonathan Safran Foer

“It feels like a moment I've lived a thousand times before, as if everything is familiar, right up to the moment of my death, that it will happen again an infinite number of times, that we will meet, marry, have our children, succeed in the ways we have, fail in the ways we have, all exactly the same, always unable to change a thing. I am again at the bottom of an unstoppable wheel, and when I feel my eyes close for death, as they have and will a thousand times, I awake.”

“Maybe I'll try to be more patient with morons.”

“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.”

“His voice was handsome and broken, like a cobblestone street.”

“No matter how much I feel, I’m not going to let it out. If I have to cry, I’m gonna cry on the inside. If I have to bleed, I’ll bruise. If my heart starts going crazy, I’m not gonna tell everyone in the world about it. It doesn’t help anything. It just makes everyone’s life worse.”

“i thought about life, about my life, the embarrassments, the little coincidences, the shadows of alarm clocks on bedside tables, i thought about my small victories and everything i'd seen destroyed. i'd swum through mink coats on my parents' bed while they hosted downstairs, i'd lost the only person with whom i could have spent my only life, i'd left behind a thousand tonnes of marble from which i could have released sculptures, i could have released myself from the marble of myself, i'd experienced joy, but not nearly enough, could there be enough? the end of suffering does not justify the suffering.”

“I tried to think about other things. I tried to invent optimistic inventions. But the pessimistic ones were extremely loud.”

“It was getting hard to keep all the things I didn't know inside me.”

“If it weren't my life, I wouldn't have believed it.”

“I have so much to say to you. I want to begin at the beginning, because that is what you deserve. I want to tell you everything, without leaving out a single detail. But where is the beginning? And what is everything?”

“...if we are to be such nomads with the truth, why do we not make the story more premium than life? It seems to me that we are making the story even inferior. We often make ourselves appear as though we are foolish people, and we make our voyage, which was an ennobled voyage, appear very normal and second rate. We could give your grandfather two arms, and could make him high-fidelity. We could give Brod what she deserves in the stead of what she gets. We could even find Augustine, Jonathan, and you could thank her, and Grandfather and I could embrace, and it could be perfect and beautiful, and funny, and usefully sad, as you say. We could even write your grandmother into your story. This is what you desire, yes? Which makes me think that perhaps we could write Grandfather into the story. Perhaps, and I am only uttering this, we could have him save your grandfather. He could be Augustine. August, perhaps. Or just Alex, if that is satisfactory to you. I do not think that there are any limits to how excellent we could make life seem.”

“I hope you never think about anything as much as I think about you.”

“To feel alone is to be alone.”

“It's just that sometimes we make things up just to talk”

“Maybe that's what a person's personality is: the difference between the inside and outside.”

“I’m not smarter than you, I’m more knowledgeable than you, and that’s only because I’m older than you. Parents are always more knowledgeable than their children, and children are always smarter than their parents.”

“He wrote, You're being crazy. You're going to catch a cold. I already have a cold. You are going to catch a colder. I could not believe he was making a joke. And I could not believe I laughed.”

“Young friends, whose string-and-tin-can phone extended from island to island, had to pay out more and more string, as if letting kites go higher and higher. They had more and more to tell each other, and less and less string. The boy asked the girl to say "I love you" into her can, giving her no further explanation. And she didn't ask for any, or say "That's silly," or "We're too young for love," or even suggest that she was saying "I love you" because he asked her to. Instead she said, "I love you." The words traveled through the long, long string. The boy covered his can with a lid, removed it from the string, and put her love for him on a shelf in his closet. Of course, he never could open the can, because then he would lose its contents. It was enough just to know it was there.”

“Everyone performs bad actions... A bad person is someone who does not lament his bad actions.”

“It stayed with him, like a part of him, like a birthmark, like a limb, it was on him, in him, him, his hymn: I had to do it for myself.”

“As for the bracelet Mom wore to the funeral, what I did was I converted Dad’s last voice message into Morse code, and I used sky-blue beads for silence, maroon beads for breaks between letters, violet beads for breaks between words, and long and short pieces of string between the beads for long and short beeps, which are actually called blips, I think, or something. Dad would have known.”

“Because it was starting to get dark, and because the streets were crowded, I bumped into a googolplex people. Who were they? Where were they going? What were they looking for? I wanted to hear their heartbeats, and I wanted them to hear mine.”

“I decided then and there never to become someone who told jokes when explanations were impossible.”

“People care about animals. I believe that. They just don’t want to know or to pay. A fourth of all chickens have stress fractures. It’s wrong. They’re packed body to body, and can’t escape their waste, and never see the sun. Their nails grow around the bars of their cages. It’s wrong. They feel their slaughters. It’s wrong, and people know it’s wrong. They don’t have to be convinced. They just have to act differently. I’m not better than anyone, and I’m not trying to convince people to live by my standards of what’s right. I’m trying to convince them to live by their own.”

“I didn't feel empty. I wished I'd felt empty. ... I wanted to be empty like an overturned pitcher. But I was full like a stone.”

“What about the teakettle? What if the spout opened and closed when the steam came out, so it would become a mouth, and it could whistle pretty melodies, or do Shakespeare, or just crack up with me.”

“How did her life live itself without her.”

“That's the difference between heaven and hell! In hell we starve! In heaven we feed each other!”

“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.”

“In the end I was the clay and she was the sculptor, I thought, it's a shame that we have to live, but it's a tragedy that we get to live only one life, because if I'd had two lives, I would have spent one of them with her.”

“Parents are always more knowledgeable than their children, and children are always smarter than their parents.”

“Darling,You asked me to write you a letter, so I am writing you a letter. I do not know why I am writing you this letter, or what this letter is supposed to be about, but I am writing it nonetheless, because I love you very much and trust that you have some good purpose for having me write this letter. I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love.Your father”

“Hoe destructief moet een culinaire voorkeur zijn, willen we besluiten iets anders te eten?”

“Hoewel de bevolking dus niet profiteert van de bio-industrie, is het ironische ook nog eens dat ze niet alleen van ons verwachten dat we hun producten kopen, maar ook nog eens betalen voor hun fouten. Alle vervuiling, alle onkosten voor het opruimen van hun afval wentelen ze af op de gemeenschap. Hun prijzen zijn kunstmatig laag - voor alle verborgen kosten mag iedereen nog jarenlang betalen.”

“Only now do I understand the war against boredom, the lost cause of empty hours, of empty days and nights.”

“Mr. Black started singing a song in some weird language, which I guess was Philippinish.”

“You have to do something bad to do something good.”

“creating a trail of things i wasn't able to tell you”

“i couldn't speak the language of his feelings”

“I couldn’t explain my need to myself, and that’s why it was such a beautiful need”

“She saw through the shell of me into the center of me”

“We looked at each other until it felt like everything would burst into flames”

“Their length could not be measured in years, just as an ocean could not explain the distance we have traveled, just as the dead can never be counted.”

“It was one of the best days of my life, a day during which I lived my life and didn't think about my life at all.”

“I went to my grandmother... and asked her to write a letter. I hardly knew her. I didn't have any interest in knowing her. I have no need for the past, I thought, like a child. I did not consider that the past might have a need for me.What kind of letter? my grandmother asked.I told her to write whatever she wanted to write.You want a letter from me? she asked.I told her yes.Oh, God bless you, she said.”

“And the general shot my sister. I could not look at her, but I remember the sound of when she hit the ground. I hear that sound when things hit the ground still. Anything.’ If I could, I would make it so nothing ever hit the ground again.”

“God loves the plagiarist. And so it is written, 'God created humankind in His image, in the image of God He created them." God is the original plagiarizer. With a lack of reasonable sources from which to filch - man created in the image of what? the animals? - the creation of man was an act of reflexive plagiarizing; God looted the mirror. When we plagiarize, we are likewise creating in the image and participating in the completion of Creation.”

“A map such as that one is worth many hundreds, and as luck will have it, thousands of dollars. But more than this, it is a remembrance of that time before our planet was so small. When this map was made, I thought, you could live without knowing where you were not living.”

“In zijn eentje doodt Smithfield (Amerika's grootste producent van varkensvlees) jaarlijks meer varkens dan het gezamelijke inwonertal van New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, Philadelphia, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas, San Jose, Detroit, Jacksonville, Indianapolis, San Francisco, Columbus, Austin, Forth Worth en Memphis - ongeveer 31 miljoen dieren.”

“Seventig tot negentig procent van de kippen in de winkel heeft een andere potentieel dodelijke ziektekiem onder de leden, de campylobacter. De kippen worden vaak door een chloorbad gehaald om slijk, stank en bacteriën weg te spoelen. Grote kans dat het de consument opvalt dat hun kip niet helemaal smaakt zoals het hoort - hoe lekker kan een met medicijnen volgepropte, van ziektes vergeven en met stront overdekte vogel in vredesnaam smaken? - dus wordt het vlees geïnjecteerd met kunstmatige geur- en smaakstoffen en zoutoplossingen zodat het oogt, ruikt en smaakt zoals we het intussen gewend zijn. (Uit onderzoek van consumentenorganisaties is gebleken dat kip- en kalokoenproducten, vaak zelfs met het predicaat 'natuurlijk', voor tien tot dertig procent bestaan uit toegevoegde geur- en smaakstoffen en water.”