Jonathan Safran Foer
Jonathan Safran Foer
Jonathan Safran Foeris an American novelist. He is best known for his novels Everything Is Illuminated, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and for his non-fiction work Eating Animals. He teaches creative writing at New York University...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth21 February 1977
CountryUnited States of America
kindness exercise compassion
Compassion is a muscle that gets stronger with use, and the regular exercise of choosing kindness over cruelty would change us.
children responsibility animal
It shouldn't be the consumer's responsibility to figure out what's cruel and what's kind, what's environmentally destructive and what's sustainable. Cruel and destructive food products should be illegal. We don't need the option of buying children's toys made with lead paint, or aerosols with chlorofluorocarbons, or medicines with unlabeled side effects. And we don't need the option of buying factory-farmed animals.
night blue sky
The sky slowly pulled up its blue dress to reveal night.
running hurt laughter
I asked my schoolmate Mary to write a letter to me. She was funny and full of life. She liked to run around her empty house without any clothes on, even once she was too old for that. Nothing embarrassed her. I admired that so much, because everything embarrassed me, and that hurt me. She loved to jump on her bed. She jumped on her bed for so many years that one afternoon, while I watched her jump, the seams burst. Feathers filled the small room. Our laughter kept the feathers in the air. I thought about birds. Could they fly if there wasn’t someone, somewhere, laughing?
children missing speak
She wanted nothing more than someone to miss, to touch, with whom to speak like a child, with whom to be a child.
flames felt
We looked at each other until it felt like everything would burst into flames
shells saws
She saw through the shell of me into the center of me
feelings language speak
i couldn't speak the language of his feelings
You have to do something bad to do something good.
suffering fool doe
The end of suffering does not justify the suffering, what a mess I am, I thought, what a fool, how foolish and narrow, how worthless, how pinched and pathetic, how helpless.
our-love affliction cures
Our love was the affliction for which only our love was the cure.
rooms share conversation
It was terrible. All of the things we couldn't share. The room was filled with conversations we weren't having.
strong crazy thinking
This isn't animal experimentation, where you an imagine some proportionate good at the other end of the suffering. This is what we feel like eating. Tell me something: Why is taste, the crudest of our sense, exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other sense? If you stop and think about it, it's crazy. Why doesn't a horny person has as strong a claim to raping an animal as a hungry one does to killing and eating it?
children teaching community
Choosing leaf or flesh, factory farm or family farm, does not in itself change the world, but teaching ourselves, our children, our local communities, and our nation to choose conscience over ease can.