Quotes by Jonathan Safran Foer

About Jonathan Safran Foer:

Jonathan Safran Foer is an American writer. He is best known for his novels Everything Is Illuminated (2002), Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) and Eating Animals (2009). He teaches creative writing at New York University.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Today, it isn't unusual for meat to travel almost halfway around the globe to reach your supermarket. The average distance our meat travels hovers arounf fifteen hundred miles.

Jonathan Safran Foer

Perhaps in the back of our minds we already understand, without all the science I've discussed, that something terribly wrong is happening. Our sustenance now comes from misery. We know that if someone offers to show us a film on how our meat is prod...

Jonathan Safran Foer

We are breeding creatures incapable of surviving in any place other than the most artificial settings. We have focused the awesome power of modern genetic knowledge to bring into being animals that suffer more.

Jonathan Safran Foer

Not responding is a response--we are equally responsible for what we don't do. In the case of animal slaughter, to throw your hands in the air is to wrap your fingers around a knife handle.

Jonathan Safran Foer

Do you eat chicken because you are familiar with the scientific literature on them and have decided that their suffering doesn't matter, or do you do it because it tastes good?

Jonathan Safran Foer

Humans are the only animals that have children on purpose, keep in touch (or don't), care about birthdays, waste and lose time, brush their teeth, feel nostalgia, scrub stains, have religions and political parties and laws, wear keepsakes, apologize ...

Jonathan Safran Foer

Whether we change our lives or do nothing, we have responded. To do nothing is to do something.

Jonathan Safran Foer

Needless to say, jamming deformed, drugged, overstressed birds together in a filthy, waste-coated room is not very healthy. Beyond deformities, eye damage, blindness, bacterial infections of bones, slipped vertebrae, paralysis, internal bleeding, ane...

Jonathan Safran Foer

We need a better way to talk about eating animals. We need a way that brings meat to the center of public discussion in the same way it is often at the center of our plates. This doesn't require that we pretend we are going to have a collective agree...

Jonathan Safran Foer

This brings me back to the image of Kafka standing before a fish in the Berlin aquarium, a fish on which his gaze fell in a newly found peace after he decided not to eat animals. Kafka recognized that fish as a member of his invisible family- not as ...

Jonathan Safran Foer

We know, at least, that this decision (ending factory farming) will help prevent deforestation, curb global warming, reduce pollution, save oil reserves, lessen the burden on rural America, decrease human rights abuses, improve publish health, and he...

Jonathan Safran Foer

Thanksgiving is the holiday that encompasses all others. All of them, from Martin Luther King Day to Arbor Day to Christmas to Valentine's Day, are in one way or another about being thankful.

Jonathan Safran Foer

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 ...

Jonathan Safran Foer

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 w...

Jonathan Safran Foer

If we are not given the option to live without violence, we are given the choice to center our meals around harvest or slaughter, husbandry or war. We have chosen slaughter. We have chosen war. That's the truest version of our story of eating animals...

Jonathan Safran Foer

...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 affli...

Jonathan Safran Foer

When we lift our forks, we hang our hats somewhere. We set ourselves in one relationship or another to farmed animals, farm-workers, national economies, and global markets. Not making a decision--eating 'like everyone else'--is to make the easiest de...

Jonathan Safran Foer

Our response to the factory farm is ultimately a test of how we respond to the powerless, to the most distant, to the voiceless - it is a test of how we act when no one is forcing us to act one way or another. Consistency is not required, but engagem...

Jonathan Safran Foer

We perhaps know more than we care to admit, keeping it down in the dark places of our memory-disavowed. When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own.

Jonathan Safran Foer

It can be challenge enough to have to eat with myself.

Jonathan Safran Foer

Food for her is not food, it is terror, dignity, gratitude, vengeance, joyfulness, humiliation, religion, history, and, of course, love. As if the fruit she always offered us were picked from the destroyed brances of out family tree.

Jonathan Safran Foer

Author Bio

  • NameJonathan Safran Foer
  • DescriptionNovelist
  • BornFebruary 21, 1977
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionWriter; Novelist