Foer Quotes

According to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, if cows were a country, they would rank third in greenhouse gas emissions, after China and the United States. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

I missed you even when I was with you. That's been my problem. I miss what I already have, and I surround myself with things that are missing. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Whenever people cried themselves to sleep, the tears would all go to the same place, and in the morning the weatherman could report if the water level of the Reservoir of Tears had gone up or down, and you could know if New York was in heavy boots. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Indeed, this is an important characteristic of the globalization debate: the tendency toward glorifying all things indigenous even when they deserve to be left in the past. ~ Franklin Foer

In another place, their sons were killed between the barbs of their own guard wire, killed with misfired bombs while squirming in the mire like animals, killed with friendly fire, killed sometimes without knowing that they were about to die - a bullet through the head while joking with a comrade, laughing ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Is that growing old? Or is it something worse? ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

The more we remember, the better we are at processing the world. And the better we are at processing the world, the more we can remember about it. ~ Joshua Foer

From where she is, the page- her paper-thin future-is infinitely heavy. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Do you have any coffee?' ... 'It stunts my growth, and I'm afraid of death. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

...an infinitely blank book and the rest of time. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

There are still many different ways to get stuck, existentially stuck. Feeling like, "This is worthless. I'm wasting my time, and I would be wasting the time of someone who tried to read this." It happens all the time. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

People always ask what a book is about, as if it has to be about something. I don't want to write books that lend themselves to that sort of description. My books are more a kind of breaking-down. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

You had a talk? You think talk got us out of Egypt or Entebbe? Uh-uh. Plague and Uzis. Talk gets you a good place in line for a shower that isn't a shower. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

It was not until very much in the posterior that I understanded that each of us was laughing for a different reason, for our own reason, and that not on of those reasons had a thing to do with the potato. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

I was thankful," said my father, "for the make-believe. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

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. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Our ability to find humor in the world, to make connections between previously unconnected notions, to create new ideas, to share in a common culture: All these essentially human acts depend on memory. ~ Joshua Foer

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? ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

I flipped back through the pad of paper while I thought about what Stephen Hawking would do next. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

What's weird," I said, "is that I've never seen you cry." He said, "I cry all the time. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

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. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

He was leaving me. I wondered if I should stop him. If I should wrestle him to the ground and force him to love me. I wanted to hold his shoulders down and shout into his face. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

She was so beautiful, like someone who you will never meet, but always dream of meeting, like someone who is too good for you. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

You can call your turkey organic and torture it daily. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Sometimes my hand starts to burn and I am convinced we are writing the same word at the same moment. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

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. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Finding patterns and structure in information is how our brains extract meaning from the world, and putting words to music and rhyme are a way of adding extra levels of pattern and structure to language. It's the reason Homeric bards sang their epic oral poems, the reason that the Torah is marked up with little musical notations, and the reason we teach kids the alphabet in a song and not as twenty-six individual letters. Song is the ultimate structuring device for language. ~ Joshua Foer

Or perhaps a widow found him and took him in: brought him an easy chair, changed his sweater every morning, shaved his face until the hair stopped growing, took him faithfully to bed with her every night, whispered sweet nothings into what was left of his ear, laughed with him over black coffee, cried with him over yellowing pictures, talked greenly about having kids of her own, began to miss him before she became sick, left him everything in her will, thought of only him as she died, always knew he was fiction but believed in him anyway. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

We spent our lives making livings. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Words never mean what we want them to mean. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

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. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Just as we accumulate memories of facts by integrating them into a network, we accumulate life experiences by integrating them into a web of other chronological memories. The denser the web, the denser the experience of time. ~ Joshua Foer

It is forgetting, not remembering, that is the essence of what makes us human. To make sense of the world, we must filter it. "To think," Borges writes, "is to forget. ~ Joshua Foer

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. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

More than any set of practices, factory farming is a mind-set: reduce production costs to the absolute minimum and systematically ignore or "externalize" such costs as environmental degradation, human disease, and animal suffering. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

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. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

It was the feeling of not wanting to live in the world, even if it was the only place to live. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Indeed, one would be hard put to say which was more real for him: the world of imagination in which he lived, or the world of reality in which he was but a temporary guest. ~ Joshua Foer

In the case of animal slaughter, to throw your hands in the air is to wrap your fingers around a knife handle. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

There are only some many times you can utter "It does not hurt" before it begins to hurt even more than the hurt. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

I was of the opinion that the past is past, and like all that is not now it should remain buried along the side of our memories. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

What does it remember like? ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

She spent an afternoon staring at their front door.
Waiting for someone? Yankel asked.
What color is this?
He stood very close to the door, letting the end of his nose touch the peephole. He licked the wood and joked, It certainly tastes like red.
Yes, it is red, isn't it?
Seems so.
She buried her head in her hands. But couldn't it be just a bit more red? ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

I hated the gnawing longing that accompanied having everything. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

People who become used to saying little become used to feeling little. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

To think," Borges writes, "is to forget. ~ Joshua Foer

Eating a piece of meat, at its most efficient, we could say is like throwing away six times that amount of food every time you eat it because you're recycling all those calories through it. I know a lot of people who came to this issue not through animal welfare but through wastefulness. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

To improve, we must watch ourselves fail, and learn from our mistakes. ~ Joshua Foer

AND IF WE ARE TO STRIVE FOR A BETTER FUTURE, MUSTN'T WE BE FAMILIAR AND RECONCILED WITH OUR PAST? ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

1987: "We cannot assume that young people today know things that were known in the past by almost every literate person in the culture." Hirsch has argued that students are being sent out into the world without the basic level of cultural literacy that is necessary to be a good citizen (what does it say that two thirds of American seventeen-year-olds can't even tell you within fifty years when the Civil War occurred?), and what's needed is a kind of educational counterreformation that reemphasizes hard facts. ~ Joshua Foer

We say no to lots of things that would please us. I would like to punch people every now and then, but I don't. I would like to have something for free rather than pay for it. I would like to skip to the front of the line ... I don't mean to brush aside the taste of meat, which is a powerful attraction. But its power is not without limit. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Little was known, which made what little was known terrifying. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

I didn't want to hear about death. It was all anyone talked about, even when no one was actually talking about it. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

She was not crying
Which surprised me very much
But I understand now
That she had found places
For her melancholy
That were behind more masks
Than only her eyes ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

I opened the coffin.
I was surprised again, although again I shouldn't have been. I was surprised that Dad wasn't there. In my brain I knew he wouldn't be, obviously, but I guess my heart believed something else. Or maybe I was surprised by incredibly empty it was. I felt like I was looking into the dictionary definition of emptiness. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Don't you find that strange? I can't believe I never found it strange before. It's like your name, how you don't notice it for so long, but when you finally do, you can't help but say it over and over, and wonder why you never thought it was strange that you should have that name, and that everyone has been calling you that name for you whole life. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

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. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

What we call expertise is really just "vast amounts of knowledge, pattern-based retrieval, and planning mechanisms acquired over many years of experience in the associated domain." In other words, a great memory isn't just a by-product of expertise; it is the essence of expertise. ~ Joshua Foer

We had everything to say to each other, but no ways to say it ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Well, what I don't get is why do we exist? I don't mean how, but why.' I watched the fireflies of his thoughts orbit his head. He said, 'we exist because we exist ... we could imagine all sorts of universes like this one, but this is the one that happened. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Because sometimes people who seem good
end up being not as good as you might have hoped. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Creativity is the ability to form similar connections between disparate images and to create something new and hurl it into the future so it becomes a poem, or a building, or a dance, or a novel. Creativity is, in a sense, future memory. If the essence of creativity is linking disparate facts and ideas, then the more facility you have making associations, and the more facts and ideas you have at your disposal, the better you'll be at coming up with new ideas. ~ Joshua Foer

I believe that they who wish to do easy things without trouble and toil must previously have been trained in more difficult things, ~ Joshua Foer

When you're a dad, there's no one above you. If I don't do something that has to be done, who is going to do it? ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

I didn't intend to write about totems or people searching. I tried not to constrain myself, and this is what I ended up with. There's this great Auden quote: "I look at what I write so I can see what I think." ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

I don't speak," he wrote, "I'm sorry. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Succotash my cocker spaniel, you fudging crevasse-hole dipshiitake! ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

I felt it very moving to feel his touch, and to remember that hands can also show love. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Shyness is when you turn your head away from something you want. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Objects that don't exist don't exist. If we were to imagine such a thing as an object that didn't exist, it would be that thing that God hated. This is the strongest argument against the nonbeliever. If God didn't exist, he would have to hate himself, and that is obviously nonsense. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

When I got off the plane, after eleven hours of travel and forty years away, the man took my passport and asked me the purpose of my visit, I wrote in my daybook, "To mourn," and then, "To mourn try to live," he gave me a look and asked if I would consider that business or pleasure, I wrote, "Neither." "For how long do you plan to mourn and try to live?" "For as long as I can." "Are we talking about a weekend or a year?" I didn't write anything. The man said, "Next. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

One hundred years of joy can be erased in one second ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Is this why you think you are chosen by God, because only you can understand the funnies that you make about yourself? ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Killing an animals oneself is more often then not a way to forget the problem while pretending to remember. This is perhaps more harmful than ignorance. It is always possible to wake someone from sleep, but there is no amount of noise that will wake someone who is pretending to be asleep.
pg. 102. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

i couldn't speak the language of his feelings ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

I got incerdibly heavy boots about how relatively insignificant life is, and how, compared to the universe and compared to time, it didn't even matter if I exsited at all...
"Well I'm not talking about painting the Mona LIsa or curing limeter."
"Yeah?"
"If you hadn't done it, human history would have been one way..."
"Uh-huh?"
"But you did do it, so...?"
I stood on the bed, pointed my fingers at the fake stars, and screamed: "I changed the course of human history!"
"That's right."
"I changed the universe!"
"You did."
"I'm God!"
"You're an atheist."
"I don't exist!"
I fell back onto the bed, into his arms, and we cracked up together. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

The only thing more painful than being an active forgetter is to be an inert rememberer. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

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. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Elsewhere the paper notes that vegetarians and vegans (including athletes) 'meet and exceed requirements' for protein. And, to render the whole we-should-worry-about-getting-enough-protein-and-therefore-eat-meat idea even more useless, other data suggests that excess animal protein intake is linked with osteoporosis, kidney disease, calcium stones in the urinary tract, and some cancers. Despite some persistent confusion, it is clear that vegetarians and vegans tend to have more optimal protein consumption than omnivores. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

One day you will do things for me that you hate. That is what it means to be family. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Sam enjoyed knowledge. The accumulation and distribution of facts gave him a feeling of control, of utility, of the opposite of the powerlessness that comes with having a smallish, underdeveloped body that doesn't dependably respond to the mental commands of a largish, overstimulated brain. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Use humor as aggressively as chemo. Laugh until your hair falls out. There is nothing that can't be played for a laugh. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Not responding is a response - we are equally responsible for what we don't do. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Animal agriculture makes a 40% greater contribution to global warming than all transportation in the world combined; it is the number one cause of climate change. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Sadness of feeling the need to create beautiful things; ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Our subjective experience of time is highly variable. We all know that days can pass like weeks and months can feel like years, and that the opposite can be just as true: A month or year can zoom by in what feels like no time at all. ~ Joshua Foer

Sadness and joy aren't opposites of each other. They are each the opposite of indifference. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

I would have done anything for him. Maybe that was my sickness. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Shame is the work of memory against forgetting. Shame is what we feel when we almost entirely - yet not entirely - forget social expectations and our obligations to others in favor of our immediate gratification. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

I realized I was on a something island. 'How did I get here,' I wondered, surrounded by Nothing, and how can I get back? ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

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 could never have war anymore. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

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. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

They learned to hate her unknowability, her untouchability, the collage of her. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

When you hide your face from the world, you can't see the world. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Life seems to speed up as we get older because life gets less memorable as we get older. ~ Joshua Foer

I woke up once in the middle of the night, and Buckminster's paws were on my eyelids. He must have been feeling my nightmares. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

At first it made me angry, but then it made me sad, and then it made me so grateful, and then it made me angry again, and I went through these feelings hundreds of times, stopping on each for only a moment and then moving to the next. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

When you want to get good at something, how you spend your time practicing is far more important than the amount of time you spend. ~ Joshua Foer

On average, Americans eat the equivalent of 21,000 entire animals in a lifetime - one ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

We can't plead ignorance, only indifference. Those alive today are the generations that came to know better. We have the burden and the opportunity of living in the moment when the critique of factory farming broke into the popular consciousness. We are the ones of whom it will be fairly asked, What did you do when you learned the truth about eating animals? ~ Jonathan Safran Foer