Jonathan Safran Foer quotes - page 9

I used to tuck her ... but now she tucked my feelings into the woven arteries of my veins. (Jonathan Safran Foer)
The responsibility lies with the mentality of the meat industry that treats both animals and "human capital" like machines ... human beings cannot be human (much less humane) under the conditions of a factory farm or slaughterhouse. View quote
Jonathan Safran Foer
Stalin found out about the community and sent his thugs in, just a few days before I got there, to break all of their arms! That was worse than killing them! It was a horrible sight, Oskar: their arms in crude splints, straight in front of them like zombies! They couldn't feed themselves, because they couldn't get their hands to their mouths! So you know what they did!" "They starved?" "They fed each other! That's the difference between heaven and hell! In hell we starve! In heaven we feed each other!" I don't believe in the afterlife. View quote
Jonathan Safran Foer
Just how destructive does a culinary preference have to be before we decide to eat something else? View quote
Jonathan Safran Foer
When I was your age, my grandfather bought me a ruby bracelet. It was too big for me and would slide up and down my arm. It was almost a necklace. He later told me that he had asked the jeweler to make it that way. Its size was supposed to be a symbol of his love. More rubies, more love. But I could not wear it comfortably. I could not wear it at all. So here is the point of everything I have been trying to say. If I were to give a bracelet to you, now, I would measure your wrist twice. View quote
Jonathan Safran Foer
I wanted to build walls around him, I wanted to separate inside from outside, I wanted to give him an infinitely long blank book and the rest of time. View quote
Jonathan Safran Foer
By the standards of the international human rights community, the typical working conditions in America's slaughterhouses constitute human rights violations. View quote
Jonathan Safran Foer
Brod's life was a slow realization that the world was not for her, and that for whatever reason, she would never be happy and honest at the same time. She felt as if she were brimming, always producing and hoarding more love inside her. But there was no release. Table, ivory elephant charm, rainbow, onion, hairdo, mollusk, Shabbos, violence, cuticle, melodrama, ditch, honey, doily ... None of it moved her. She addressed her world honestly, searching for something deserving of the volumes of love she knew she had within her, but to each she would have to say, I don't love you. View quote
Jonathan Safran Foer
SADNESSES OF THE COVENANT: Sadness of God's love; Sadness of God's back [sic]; Favorite-child sadness; Sadness of b[ein]g sad in front of one's God; Sadness of the opposite of belief [sic]; What if? Sadness; Sadness of God alone in heaven; Sadness of a God who would need people to pray to Him... View quote
Jonathan Safran Foer
He had a wall of masks from every country he‘d been to, like Armenia and Chile and Ethiopia. It‘s not a horrible world, he told me, but it‘s filled with a lot of horrible people. View quote
Jonathan Safran Foer
But more than that, no unloving words were ever spoken, and everything was held up as another small piece of proof that it can be this way, it doesn't have to be that way; if there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it heavy 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 jeweler's felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does. (Jonathan Safran Foer)
We shouldn't be intimidated by someone else's idea of perfection if it will prevent us from taking steps we actively want to take. View quote
Jonathan Safran Foer
There are a lot of things that we crave, there are a lot of things that would make us perhaps more fulfilled in a sensory way that we just say no to. View quote
Jonathan Safran Foer
Consumers are going to have get used to eating less meat - to paying more for better quality meat and eating significantly less of it. View quote
Jonathan Safran Foer
I know lots and lots and lots of vegetarians who think it's perfectly all right to kill animals for food to eat, but don't do it because they think all the ways in which it's done are wrong. View quote
Jonathan Safran Foer
These little daily choices that we're so used to thinking are irrelevant are the most important thing we do all day long. View quote
Jonathan Safran Foer
Few people sufficiently appreciate the colossal task of feeding a world of billions of omnivores who demand meat with their potatoes. View quote
Jonathan Safran Foer
Just about every children's book in my local bookstore has an animal for its hero. But then, only a few feet away in the cookbook section, just about every cookbook includes recipes for cooking animals. Is there a more illuminating illustration of our paradoxical relationship with the nonhuman world? View quote
Jonathan Safran Foer
Living on a planet of fixed size requires compromise, and while we are the only party capable of negotiating, we are not the only party at the table. We've never claimed more, and we've never had less. View quote
Jonathan Safran Foer
When it comes to meat, change is almost always cast as an absolute. You are a vegetarian or you are not. View quote
Jonathan Safran Foer
If the thrill of hunting were in the hunt, or even in the marksmanship, a camera would do just as well. (Jonathan Safran Foer)
It would be refreshing to have a politician try to defend guns without any reference to the Second Amendment, but on the merits of guns. View quote
Jonathan Safran Foer
It's rarely talked about, but hunting for sport is just about as vile as we humans get. View quote
Jonathan Safran Foer
Books are slow, books are quiet. The Internet is fast and loud. View quote
Jonathan Safran Foer
It's a good rule of thumb, it seems to me: if you're not allowed to see where something comes from, don't put it in your mouth. View quote
Jonathan Safran Foer