Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

Biography

Type: Novelist

Born: February 21, 1977

Died:

Jonathan Safran Foer (born February 21, 1977) is an American novelist. He is best known for his novels "Everything Is Illuminated" (2002), "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" (2005), and for his non-fiction work "Eating Animals" (2009). He teaches creative writing at New York University.

Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

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.

Time was passing like a hand waving from a train I wanted to be on.
I hope you never have to think about anything as much as I think about you.

If there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it walls, and we will furnish it with soft, red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweller's felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does.

Why are you leaving me?
He wrote, I do not know how to live.
I do not know either but I am trying.
I do not know how to try.
There were some things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him. So i buried them and let them hurt me

Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.

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.

It was not the feeling of completeness I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty.

I don't think that there are any limits to how excellent we could make life seem.

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.

With writing, we have second chances.

A few weeks after the worst day, I started writing lots of letters. I don't know why, but it was one of the only things that made my boots lighter.

Writing's funny, it's like walking down a hall in the dark looking for the light switch, and suddenly you find it, flip it on, and then you discover the hallway you passed through is papered with the novel you've written.

I realized that your mother couldn't see the emptiness, she couldn't see anything...All of the words I'd written to her over all of those years, had I never said anything to hear at all?

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

We spent our lives making livings.

As we drove, I imagined we were standing still and the world was coming toward us.

There are more places you haven't heard of then you're heard of!' I loved that

You are the only one who has understood even a whisper of me, and I will tell you that I am the only person who has understood even a whisper of you.

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.

I imagine a line, a white line, painted on the sand and on the ocean, from me to you.

He promised us that everything would be okay. I was a child, but I knew that everything would not be okay. That did not make my father a liar. It made him my father.

(What are your ghosts like?)
(They are on the insides of the lids of my eyes.)
(This is also where my ghosts reside.)
(You have ghosts?)
(Of course I have ghosts.)
(But you are a child.)
(I am not a child.)
(But you have not known love.)
(These are my ghosts, the spaces amid love.)

Succotash my cocker spaniel, you fudging crevasse-hole dipshiitake!

Grandfather informs me that is not possible.

I will describe my eyes and then begin the story. My eyes are blue and resplendent. Now I will begin the story.

I'm sorry for my inability to let unimportant things go, for my inability to hold on to the important things.

I am always sad, I think. Perhaps this signifies that I am not sad at all, because sadness is something lower than your normal disposition, and I am always the same thing. Perhaps I am the only person in the world, then, who never becomes sad. Perhaps I am lucky.

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.

It has shown me that everything is illuminated in the light of the past. It is always along the side of us...on the inside, looking out.

There's nothing wrong with not understanding yourself.

I want an infinitely blank book and the rest of time...
...why didn't I learn to treat everything like it was the last time, my greatest regret is how much I believed in the future.

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

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

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

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

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

Feathers filled the small room. Our laughter kept the feathers in the air. I thought about birds. Could they fly is there wasn't someone, somewhere, laughing?

You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.

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

...is ignorance bliss, I don't know, but it's so painful to think, and tell me, what did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever bring me? I think and think and think, I've thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.

You can not protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.

It's true, I am afraid of dying. I am afraid of the world moving forward without me, of my absence going unnoticed, or worse, being some natural force propelling life on. Is it selfish? 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.

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.

I said, 'I need to know how he died.'
He flipped back and pointed at, 'Why?'
So I can stop inventing how he died. I'm always inventing.

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.

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.

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

I could not believe in a God that would challenge faith like this.

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

...and when is enough proof enough?

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!

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

Why do beautiful songs make you sad?' 'Because they aren't true.' 'Never?' 'Nothing is beautiful and true.

For Nicole, my idea of beauty

I know a lot about birds and bees, but I don't know very much about the birds and the bees. Everything I do know I had to teach myself on the Internet, because I don't have anyone to ask. For example, I know that you give someone a blowjob by putting your penis in their mouth.

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.

Nobody likes war not even those who survive it, not even the winners.

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.

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

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

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.
I love you,
Grandma.

...Food serves two parallel purposes: it nourishes and it helps you remember. Eating and storytelling are inseparable - the saltwater is also tears; the honey not only tastes sweet, but makes us think of sweetness; the matzo is the bread of our affliction.

A few days after we came home from the hospital, I sent a letter to a friend, including a photo of my son and some first impressions of fatherhood. He responded, simply, 'Everything is possible again.' It was the perfect thing to write because that was exactly how it felt.

Human beings are the only animal that blushes, laughs, has religion, wages war, and kisses with lips. So in a way, the more you kiss with lips, the more human you are.

In other words, if everyone wants to play Hamlet all at once, they couldn't because there aren't enough skulls.

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

Songs are as sad as the listener.

If we communicated with something like music, we would never be misunderstood, because there is nothing in music to understand...... But until we find this new way of speaking, until we can find a nonapproximate vocabulary, nonsense words are the best thing we've got. Ifactifice is one such word.

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

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.

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.

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