The Best Jonathan Safran Foer quotes

I wanted so much to have a life. Even just once, even for a second. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Life is scarier than death. — Jonathan Safran Foer

If it weren’t my life, I wouldn’t have believed it. — Jonathan Safran Foer

How did her life live itself without her. — Jonathan Safran Foer

What do babies dream of? She must be dreaming of the before–life, just as I dream of the afterlife. — Jonathan Safran Foer

I don’t think that there are any limits to how excellent we could make life seem. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Was his death an essential stage in the continuation of his life? — Jonathan Safran Foer

I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live. — Jonathan Safran Foer

It would be possible, in theory, for life and art to be reversed. — Jonathan Safran Foer

So many people enter and leave your life! Hundreds of thousands of people! You have to keep the door open so they can come in! But it also means you have to let them go! — Jonathan Safran Foer

When I looked at you, my life made sense. Even the bad things made sense. They were necessary to make you possible. — Jonathan Safran Foer

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. — Jonathan Safran Foer

My life story is the story of everyone I’ve ever met. — Jonathan Safran Foer

The bruises go away, and so does how you hate, and so does the feeling that everything you receive from life is something you have earned. — Jonathan Safran Foer

People who want to find a place of rest, want to find an integrated personality, sense of self, want fewer fractures in their lives. — Jonathan Safran Foer

She was like a drowning person, flailing, reaching for anything that might save her. Her life was an urgent, desperate struggle to justify her life. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Everyone is always in need of something that another person can give, be it undivided attention, a kind word or deep empathy. There is no better use of a life than to be attentive to such needs. — Jonathan Safran Foer

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. — Jonathan Safran Foer

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? — Jonathan Safran Foer

We spent our lives making livings. — Jonathan Safran Foer

To feel alone is to be alone. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Highs and lows make you feel that things matter, but they’re nothing.’ ‘So what’s something?’ ‘Being reliable is something. Being good. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Most of the times that I think about my relationship to Judaism, I not only accuse myself of a shallowness, but I feel certain that there’s a shallowness there. That’s not a bad thing, really. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Family are the people who must make you feel ashamed when you are deserving of shame. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Everything is the way it is because everything was the way it was. Sometimes I feel ensnared in this, as if no matter what I do, what will come has already been fixed. — Jonathan Safran Foer

I spent my life learning to feel less. — Jonathan Safran Foer

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. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Sometimes I can feel my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living. — Jonathan Safran Foer

I spent my life learning to feel less. Every day I felt less. Is that growing old? Or is it something worse? You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness. — Jonathan Safran Foer

I am doing something I hate for you. This is what it means to be in love. — Jonathan Safran Foer

She was with me. She did all of those things and so many more, things I would never tell anyone, and she never even loved me. Now that’s love. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Let love write on you for awhile. — Jonathan Safran Foer

I did not need to know if he could love me. I needed to know if he could need me. — Jonathan Safran Foer

It’s the tragedy of loving, you can’t love anything more than something you miss. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Love…is the immovability of truth. — Jonathan Safran Foer

That’s all anyone wants from anyone else, not love itself but the knowledge that love is there. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Our love was the affliction for which only our love was the cure. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Just because you’re an atheist, that doesn’t mean you wouldn’t love for things to have reasons for why they are. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Love me, because love doesn’t exist, and I have tried everything that does. — Jonathan Safran Foer

The more you love someone, he came to think, the harder it is to tell them. It surprised him that strangers didn’t stop each other on the street to say I love you. — Jonathan Safran Foer

The animals are those things that God likes but doesn’t love. — Jonathan Safran Foer

I love sushi, I love fried chicken, I love steak. But there is a limit to my love. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Accepting the compromise of the way we have been, the way we are, and the way we will likely be…may we live together in unwavering love and good health, amen. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Sadness of love without release. — Jonathan Safran Foer

I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love. — Jonathan Safran Foer

She had fallen in love so many times that she began to suspect she was not falling in love at all, but doing something much more ordinary. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Why didn’t he say goodbye? I gave myself a bruise. Why didn’t he say ‘I love you’? — Jonathan Safran Foer

What were we spending so much time doing if not getting to know each other? — Jonathan Safran Foer

I want to talk about God in a literary way. But I think I would have a very hard time praying to God. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Once you hear something, you can never return to the time before you heard it. — Jonathan Safran Foer

I am not a bad person. I am a good person who has lived in a bad time.’ Alex’s grandfather..Everything is Illuminated — Jonathan Safran Foer

There is no greater gift than time. — Jonathan Safran Foer

I shook my tambourine the whole time, because it helped me remember that even though I was going through different neighborhoods, I was still me. — Jonathan Safran Foer

I want an infinitely blank book and the rest of time. — Jonathan Safran Foer

I got incredibly 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 existed at all. — Jonathan Safran Foer

For a long time, I thought I would like to be a doctor. Such a good profession. So explicitly good. Never a waste of time. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Memory was supposed to fill the time, but it made time a hole to be filled. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Why didn’t I learn to treat everything like it was the last time. My greatest regret was how much I believed in the future. — Jonathan Safran Foer

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? — Jonathan Safran Foer

I know you look both ways before you cross the street, but I want you to look both ways a second time, because I told you to. — Jonathan Safran Foer

It’s not worth getting too excited about thinking about the larger picture. The larger picture doesn’t come into focus for an awfully long time. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Profound, bottomless self–doubt–it has no value–what’s the point? In a way, it takes up as much time as anything else. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Marriage is like a chess match is initiated and the board expands over time until it takes up all of a life. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Time was passing like a hand waving from a train that I wanted to be on. — 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? — Jonathan Safran Foer

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. — Jonathan Safran Foer

The world is a big place,’ he said, ‘but so is the inside of an apartment! — Jonathan Safran Foer

The end of the world has come often, and continues to come. — Jonathan Safran Foer

There has yet to be a human to survive a span of history without at least one end of the world. — Jonathan Safran Foer

But what she was really trying to say was this: I like music better than anything in the world, after you. — Jonathan Safran Foer

How could this world be so unlike the world that I believed I was living in? I can’t describe it. Do I not want to describe it, or do I simply not possess the vocabulary? — Jonathan Safran Foer

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. — Jonathan Safran Foer

How beautiful is forgetting! What relief it would be for the world to lose some of its contents. — Jonathan Safran Foer

What the world does not need is a Haggadah that pats itself on the back. It needs a Haggadah that gets out of the way, that starts a conversation and gets out of the way. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Am I such a bad person for dreaming of a world that ends when I do? I don’t mean the world ending with respect to me, but every set of eyes closing with mine. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Few people sufficiently appreciate the colossal task of feeding a world of billions of omnivores who demand meat with their potatoes. — Jonathan Safran Foer

In my family, Father is the world champion at ending conversations. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Worthy would–be worlds of words, whorls of working wonder. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Factory farmers talk about their desire to feed the world. That’s not what they’re doing. They’re feeding the world with really, really cheap stuff. — Jonathan Safran Foer

I took the world into me, rearranged it, and sent it back out as a question: ‘Do you like me? — Jonathan Safran Foer

I wasn’t having second thoughts, but I was having thoughts. — Jonathan Safran Foer

I think and think and think, I‘ve thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it. — Jonathan Safran Foer

It made me start to wonder if there were other people so lonely so close. I thought about ‘Eleanor Rigby.’ It’s true, where do they all come from? And where do they all belong? — Jonathan Safran Foer

I wouldn’t want a boy to think I was pretty unless he was the kind of boy who thought I was pretty. — Jonathan Safran Foer

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. — Jonathan Safran Foer

I thought for a minute, and then I got heavy, heavy boots. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Everything I did, I did because I thought it was the correct thing to do… I am not a hero, it is true… But I am not a bad person, either. — Jonathan Safran Foer

This is love, she thought, isn’t it? When you notice someone’s absence and hate that absence more than anything? More, even, than you love his presence? — Jonathan Safran Foer

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. — Jonathan Safran Foer

I put my hand on the doorknob because I thought maybe her hand was on the doorknob on the other side. — Jonathan Safran Foer

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

Books are for those without real lives, he thought. And they are no real replacement. — Jonathan Safran Foer

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. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Books are slow, books are quiet. The Internet is fast and loud. — Jonathan Safran Foer

I love the idea of books being more than books, or being, rather, something other than books. — Jonathan Safran Foer

I write because I want to end my loneliness. Books make people less alone. That, before and after everything else, is what books do. They show us that conversations are possible across distances. — Jonathan Safran Foer

When a book remembers, we remember. It reminds you that you have a body. So many of the things we may think of as burdensome are actually the things that make us more human. — Jonathan Safran Foer

I started carrying blank books like this one around, which I would fill with all the things I couldn’t say. — Jonathan Safran Foer