Jonathan Safran Foer

“Kalkoenen leggen tegenwoordig hondertwintig eieren per jaar en kippen meer dan driehonderd. Dat is twee tot drie keer zo veel als in de natuur.”

“Wat gebeurt er met alle mannelijke kuikens van legkippen? Als de mens ze niet heeft aangepast voor de vleesproductie en de natuur ze overduidelijk niet heeft gemaakt om eieren te leggen, welke functie hebben ze dan? Ze hebben geen functie. Daarom worden alle haantjes - de helft van alle legkippen die ter wereld komen; meer dan 250 miljoen kuikens per jaar - vernietigd. De meeste haantjes worden vernietigd door ze via een buizenstelsel naar een elektrocuteerplaat te zuigen.”

“De Verenigde Naties vatten de milieueffecten van de vleesindustrie als volgt samen: Het fokken van dieren voor de voedselproductie (ongeacht of dat in de bio-industrie of op traditionele wijze gebeurt) 'is een van de drie belangrijkste oorzaken van de meest bedreigende milieuproblemen, op elke schaal, lokaal of wereldwijd. De veeteelt zou een van de belangrijkste aandachtspunten moeten zijn als het gaat om problemen als verschraling, klimaatverandering, luchtvervuiling, watertekorten, watervervuiling en afnemende biodiversiteit. Het aandeel van de veeteelt in de milieuproblematiek is zeer aanzienlijk." Met andere woorden, als je om het milieu geeft en de wetenschappelijke resultaten van bronnen als de VN onderschrijft (of de Intergouvernementele Comissie voor Klimaatverandering, of het Center For Science in the Public Interest, de PEW-commissie, de Union of Concerned Scientists of het World-Watch Instituut,...), dan móet het eten van dieren je aan het hart gaan.”

“Antropocentrisme: de mens staat bovenaan in de evolutie, we zijn een geschikte maatstaf om het leven van andere dieren tegen af te zetten en de rechtmatige bezitter van al wat leeft.”

“...des verstorbenen Philosophen Pinchas T., der in seiner einzigen bedeutenden Abhandlung "An den Staub: vom Menschen bist du, und zum Menschen sollst du werden" argumentierte, es sei theoretisch möglich, das Leben und die Kunst gegeneinander auszutauschen.”

“The moment before he started was my favorite moment.”

“Did she always have something to read in front of her so she wouldn't have to look at anything else?”

“If it had and answer, it wouldn't really be love, would it?”

“We need much bigger pockets I thought as I lay in my bed counting off the seven minutes that it takes a normal person to fall asleep. We need enormous pockets pockets big enough for our families and our friends and even the people who aren't on our lists people we've never met but still want to protect. We need pockets for borough and for cities a pocket that could hold the universe.”

“I kept thinking how they were all names of dead people, and how names are basically the only thing dead people keep.”

“I am sure people tell you this constantly but if you looked up 'incredibly beautiful' in the dictionary there would be a picture of you.”

“How beautiful is forgetting! What relief it would be for the world to lose some of its contents.”

“Yesterday I wanted to turn inside out.”

“What were we spending so much time doing if not getting to know each other?”

“And yet and yet - the last secret of the tree of codes is that nothing can ever reach a definite conclusion. Nowhere as much as there do we feel possibilities shaken by the nearness of realization. The atmosphere becomes possibilities and we shall wander and make a thousand mistakes. We shall wander along yet not be able to understand.”

“I try not to remember the life that I didn’t want to lose but lost and have to remember”

“We hebben oorlog gevoerd, of eigenlijk hebben we een oorlog laten voeren, tegen alle dieren die we eten. Deze oorlog is nieuw en heeft een naam: bio-industrie.De bio-industrie beschouwt de natuur als een obstakel dat overwonnen moet worden.”

“Als ik ergens vertel dat ik vegetariër ben, word ik bijna altijd gewezen op een inconsequentie of probeert men een zwak punt te ontdekken in een bewering die ik nooit heb gedaan. (Ik heb vaak het idee dat mijn vegetarische levenswijze voor zulke mensen belangrijker is dan voor mij.)”

“Het keuze-geobsedeerde Westen geeft de mens die anders wil eten meer ruimte dan elke andere cultuur ooit heeft gedaan, maar de ironie wil dat de volstrekt niet kieskeurige omnivoor - 'ik vind alles best, ik eet alles' - maatschappelijk bewuster kan lijken dan de mens die op een manier probeert te eten die goed is voor de samenleving. De keuze voor een bepaald soort voedsel wordt door allerlei factoren bepaald, maar de rede (en zelfs het bewustzijn) staat doorgaans niet hoog op die lijst.”

“Als we op een dag een levensvorm tegenkomen die machtiger en intelligenter is dan wij zelf, en die soort zou ons zien zoals wij vissen zien, wat zouden we dan als argument aanvoeren om niet te worden opgegeten?”

“It shouldn't be the consumer's responsibility to figure out what's cruel and what's kind, what's environmentally destructive and what's sustainable. Cruel and destructive food products should be illegal. We don't need the option of buying children's toys made with lead paint, or aerosols with chlorofluorocarbons, or medicines with unlabeled side effects. And we don't need the option of buying factory-farmed animals.”

“If god exists, he is not to be believed in.”

“The sky slowly pulled up its blue dress to reveal night.”

“Another reason it would be a good invention is that there are so many times when you know you're feeling a lot of something, but you don't know what the something is.”

“Touching him was always so important to me. It was something I lived for. I never could explain why. Little, nothing touches. My fingers against his shoulder. The outsides of our thighs touching as we squeezed together on the bus. I couldn't explain it, but I needed it. Sometimes I imagined stitching all of our little touches together. How many hundreds of thousands of fingers brushing against each other does it take to make love? Why does anyone ever make love?”

“I observe, I write, I try not to remember the life that I didn't want to loose but lost and have to remember, being here fills my heart with so much joy, even if the joy isn't mine, and at the end of the day I fill the suitcase with old news.”

“He Wrote, Are you OK?I told him, My eyes are crummy.He wrote, But are you OK?I told him, That's a very complicated question.He wrote, That's a very simple answer.I asked, Are you OK?He wrote, Some mornings I wake up feeling grateful.”

“How many hundreds of thousands of fingers brushing against each other does it take to make love? Why does anyone ever make love?”

“Years were passing through the spaces between moments.”

“Sometimes one simply wants to disappear.”

“I hit the spacebar again and again and again. My life story was spaces.”

“That's all anyone wants from anyone else, not love itself but the knowledge that the love is there.”

“There is noting wrong with not understanding yourself.”

“Nothing is beautiful and true.”

“You could bury people one hundred floors down, and a whole dead world could be underneath the living one.”

“Fuck You!' [Oskar said] 'Exuse me!' [His mom said] 'Sorry. I mean, screw you.' 'You need a time-out!' 'I need a mausoleum!”

“I wanted to hit him.I wanted to hold him.I wanted to shout myself into his ear.”

“He was responsible. He was good. It's easy to be emotional. You can always make a scene. Highs and lows make you feel that things matter, but they're nothing." "So what's something?" "Being reliable is something, being good.”

“She said I could have a seat on the couch if I wanted to, but I told her I didn't believe in leather, so I stood.”

“When I was nine, I had a babysitter who didn't want to hurt anything. She put it just like that when I asked her why she wasn't having chicken with my older brother and me: "I don't want to hurt anything." [...] What our babysitter said made sense to me, not only because it seemed true, but because it was the extension to food of everything my parents had taught me. We don't hurt family members. We don't hurt friends or strangers. We don't even hurt upholstered furniture. My not having thought to include animals in that list didn't make them the exceptions to it. It just made me a child, ignorant of the world's workings. Until I wasn't. At which point I had to change my life.”

“Then I have some bad news for you, because humans are going to destroy each other as soon as it becomes easy enough to, which will be very soon.”

“Sometimes people who seem good end up being not as good as you might have hoped, you know?”

“I'm grateful for anything that reminds me of what's possible in this life. Books can do that. Films can do that. Music can do that. School can do that. It's so easy to allow one day to simply follow into the next, but every once in a while we encounter something that shows us that anything is possible, that dramatic change is possible, that something new can be made, that laughter can be shared.”

“Its so painful to think, and tell me what did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever get me?”

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

“I love you also means I love you more than anyone loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that no one loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that I love no one else, and never have loved anyone else, and never will love anyone else.”

“If we were to one day encounter a form of life more powerful and intelligent than our own, and it regarded us as we regard fish, what would be our argument against being eaten?”

“It is better to lose than never to have had.”

“Life is scarier than death.”

“I believed him. I was not stupid. I was his wife.”