We burned with love for ourselves, all of us, starters of the fire we suffered- our love was the affliction for which only our love was the cure.
I can't count the times that upon telling someone I am vegetarian, he or she responded by pointing out an inconsistency in my lifestyle or trying to find a flaw in an argument I never made. (I have often felt that my vegetarianism matters more to such people than it does to me.)
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects the challenges of living by personal beliefs and the scrutiny one often faces from others.
In this quote, Jonathan Safran Foer illustrates the experience of being a vegetarian and how one's personal choices can provoke intense scrutiny from others. He highlights the tendency of individuals to focus on perceived inconsistencies in the choices of others, often more so than the individuals themselves care about those choices. This speaks to a broader philosophical discussion on how society engages with personal beliefs and the importance placed on them by others.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a discussion about dietary choices and the pressures of societal norms.
More from Jonathan Safran Foer
All quotes →Memory was supposed to fill the time, but it made time a hole to be filled. Each second was two hundred yards, to be walked, crawled. You couldn't see the next hour, it was so far in the distance. Tomorrow was over the horizon, and would take an entire day to reach.
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
What do babies dream of? She must be dreaming of the before-life, just as I dream of the afterlife.
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.
What is being awake if not interpreting our dreams, or dreaming if not interpreting our wake?
Similar quotes
A man should be upright, not kept upright.
The main conclusion arrived at in this work, namely that man is descended from some lowly-organised form, will, I regret to think, be highly distasteful to many persons. But there can hardly be a doubt that we are descended from barbarians.
You have agency, and you are free to choose. But there is actually no free agency. Agency has its price. You have to pay the consequences of your choices.
When you realize the value of all life, you dwell on what is past and concentrate more on the preservation of the future.
It seems to me there is less meanness in atheism, by a good measure. It seems that the spirit of religious self-righteousness this article deplores is precisely the spirit in which it is written. Of course he's right about many things, one of them being the destructive potency of religious self-righteousness. (p. 146)
It is fashionable to wax apocalyptic about the threat to humanity posed by the AIDS virus, "mad cow" disease, and many others, but I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.