Jonathan Safran Foer

“It broke my heart into more pieces than my heart was made of, why can't people say what they mean at the time?”

“She wrote, I wish I could be a girl again, with a chance to live my life again. I have suffered so much more than I needed to. And the joys I have felt have not always been joyous. I could have lived differently.”

“In the end, everyone looses 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.”

“I asked her, "Are you an optimist or a pessimist?" She looked at her watch and said, "I'm optimistic." "Then I have some bad news for you, because humans are going to destroy each others as soon as it becomes easy enough to, which will be very soon." "Why do beautiful songs make you sad?" "Because they aren't true." "Never?" "Nothing is beautiful and true." She smiled, but in a way that wasn't just happy, and said, "You sound just like Dad.”

“And instead of singing in the shower I would write out the lyrics of my favorite songs, the ink would turn the water blue or red or green, and the music would run down my legs.”

“And how can you say I love you to someone you love? I rolled onto my side and fell asleep next to her. Here is the point of everything I have been trying to tell you, Oskar. It's always necessary.”

“My dream went all the way back to the beginning. The rain rose into the clouds, and the animals descended the ramp.”

“People around the world were moving from one place to another. No one was staying.”

“I wanted to shout myself into his ear.”

“The mistakes I've made are dead to me. But I can't take back the things I never did.”

“...people with nothing to declare carry the most.”

“But I knew the truth and that's why I was so sad. Every moment before this one depends on this one. Everything in the history of the world can be proven wrong in one moment.”

“Anyone who believes that a second is faster than a decade did not live life.”

“She wanted nothing more than someone to miss, to touch, with whom to speak like a child, with whom to be a child.”

“I like to see peoplereunited, maybe that's a silly thing, but what can I say, I like to see people run to eachother, I like the kissing and the crying, I like the impatience, the stories that the mouthcan't tell fast enough, the ears that aren't big enough, the eyes that can't take in all of thechange, I like the hugging, the bringing together, the end of missing someone”

“se nada importa, não há nada a salvar”

“Things were happening around us, but nothing was happening between us.”

“She let out a laugh, and then she put her hand over her mouth, like she was angry at herself for forgetting her sadness.”

“I wondered, for the first time in my life, if life was worth all the work it took to live. What exactly made it worth it?”

“She repeats things until they are true, or until she can't tell whether they are true or not. She has become an expert at confusing what is with what was with what should be with what could be.”

“From where she is, the page- her paper-thin future-is infinitely heavy.”

“She felt as if she were brimming, always producing and hoarding more love inside her. But there was no release.”

“He would wake from sleep to miss the weight that never depress the bed next to him, remember in earnest the weight of gestures she never made, long for the un-weight of her un-arm slung over his too real chest, making his widower's remembrances that much more convincing and the pain that much more real.”

“He was like a book that you could feel good holding, that you could talk about without ever having read, that could you recommend.”

“I wanted so much to have a life. Even just once, even for a second.”

“Being reliable is something. Being good.”

“Highs and lows make you feel that things matter, but they're nothing.”

“She told him of ship voyages she had taken to places he had never heard of, and stories he knew were all untrue, were bad not-truths, even, but he nodded, and tried to convince himself to be convinced, tried to believe her, because he knew that the origin of the story is always an absence and he wanted to live among presences.”

“However much we obfuscate or ignore it, we know that the factory farm is inhumane in the deepest sense of the word. And we know that there is something that matters in a deep way about the lives we create for the living beings most within our power. Our response to the factory farm is ultimately a test of how we respond to the powerless, to the most distant, to the voiceless--it is a test of how we act when no one is forcing us to act one way or another.”

“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.”

“Nine out of ten significant people have to do with money or war!”

“Because sometimes people who seem goodend up being not as good as you might have hoped.”

“I am willing to be annoying if that's what was necessary.”

“I asked my schoolmate Mary to write a letter to me. She was funny and full of life. She liked to run around her empty house without any clothes on, even once she was too old for that. Nothing embarrassed her. I admired that so much, because everything embarrassed me, and that hurt me. She loved to jump on her bed. She jumped on her bed for so many years that one afternoon, while I watched her jump, the seams burst. Feathers filled the small room. Our laughter kept the feathers in the air. I thought about birds. Could they fly if there wasn’t someone, somewhere, laughing?”

“I regret how much I believed in the future.”

“There are worse things, worse than being like us. Look, at least we're alive.”

“It was terrible. All of the things we couldn't share. The room was filled with conversations we weren't having.”

“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.”

“I love sushi, I love fried chicken, I love steak. But there is a limit to my love,”

“Given that eating animals is in absolutely no way necessary for my family — unlike some in the world, we have easy access to a wide variety of other foods — should we ear animals?”

“Dogs are wonderful, and in many ways unique. But they are remarkably unremarkable in their intellectual and experiential capacities. Pigs are every bit as intelligent and feeling, by any sensible definition of the words. They can't hop into the back of a Volvo, but they can fetch, run and play, be mischievous, and reciprocate affection. So why don't they get to curl up by the fire? Why can't they at least be spared being tossed on the fire?”

“I'd lost count of the disappointments.”

“He couldn't bear to live, but he couldn't bear to die. He couldn't bear the thought of he making love to someone else, but neither could he bear the absence of the thought. And as for the note, he couldn't bear to keep it, but he couldn't bear to destroy it either.”

“Ultimately, the controversy around PETA may have less to do with the organization than with those of us who stand in judgment of it - that is, with the unpleasant realization that "those PETA people" have stood up for the values we have been too cowardly or forgetful to defend ourselves.”

“I walked into a bakery seven years later and there he was. He had dogs at his feet and a bird in a cage beside him. The seven years were not seven years. They were not seven hundred years. Their length could not be measured in years, just as an ocean could not explain the distance we had traveled, just as the dead can never be counted. I wanted to run away from him, and I wanted to go right up to him.”

“The dream thatwe are our fathers. I walked to the Brod,41without knowing why, and looked intomy reflection in the water. I couldn’t lookaway. What was the image that pulled mein after it? What was it that I loved? Andthen I recognized it. So simple. In thewater I saw my father’s face, and that facesaw the face of its father, and so on, and soon, reflecting backward to the beginningof time, to the face of God, in whoseimage we were created. We burned withlove for ourselves, all of us, starters ofthe fire we suffered—our love was the afflictionfor which only our love was thecure . . .”

“Our love was the affliction for which only our love was the cure.”

“Hiçbir şeyi özlediğin bir şeyden daha fazla sevemezsin.”

“Humans are the only animals that have children on purpose, keep in touch (or don't), care about birthdays, waste and lose time, brush their teeth, feel nostalgia, scrub stains, have religions and political parties and laws, wear keepsakes, apologize years after an offense, whisper, fear themselves, interpret dreams, hide their genitalia, shave, bury time capsules, and can choose not to eat something for reasons of conscience. The justifications for eating animals and for not eating them are often identical: we are not them.”

“I could write more, but that is all that matters.”