Jonathan Safran Foer

Books are slow, books are quiet. The Internet is fast and loud.

It seems entirely possible to me that horrible things can be going on without us becoming horrible people.

We eat as sons and daughters, as families, as communities, as generations, as nations, and increasingly as a globe. We can't stop our eating from radiating influence even if we want to.

[...]It is as if after surviving so much, there was no longer reason to survive.

Consumers are going to have get used to eating less meat - to paying more for better quality meat and eating significantly less of it.

Jews have a special relationship to books, and the Haggadah has been translated more widely, and reprinted more often, than any other Jewish book. It is not a work of history or philosophy, not a prayer book, user’s manual, timeline, poem or palimpsest - and yet it is all these things.

It's the tragedy of loving, you can't love anything more than something you miss.

Kids are a great analogy. You want your kids to grow up, and you don't want your kids to grow up. You want your kids to become independent of you, but it's also a parent's worst nightmare: That they won't need you. It's like the real tragedy of parenting.

Food is not rational. Food is culture, habit, craving and identity.

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.

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

In the water I saw my father's face, and that face saw the face of its father, and so on, and so on, reflecting backward to the beginning of time, to the face of God, in whose image we were created.

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

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.

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

When you read something you have written, you have to confront some of the lies you have been telling yourself.

I took the world into me, rearranged it, and sent it back out as a question: "Do you like me?

We need a better way to talk about eating animals, a way that doesn't ignore, or even just shruggingly accept things like habits, cravings, family and history, but rather incorporates them into the conversation. The more they are allowed in, the more strongly we will want to follow our best instincts.

I brought the birdcages to the windows. I opened the windows, and opened the birdcages. I poured the fish down the drain. I took the dogs and cats downstairs and removed their collars. I released the insects onto the street. And the reptiles. And the mice. I told them, Go. All of you. Go. And they went. And they didn’t come back

Compassion is a muscle that gets stronger with use, and the regular exercise of choosing kindness over cruelty would change us.

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.