02c. 1977 ADThere are only so many times that you can utter ‘It does not hurt’ before it begins to hurt even more than the hurt. You become enlightened of the feeling of feeling hurt, which is worse, I am certain, than the existent hurt.Jonathan Safran Foer / quote ↗
03c. 1977 ADThere were things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him. So I buried them, and let them hurt me.Jonathan Safran Foer / quote ↗
04c. 1977 ADAre you an optimist or a pessimist?" "I can't remember. Which?" "Do you know what those words mean?" "Not really." "An optimist is positive and hopeful. A pessimist is negative and cynical." "I'm an optimist." "Well, that's good, because there’s no irrefutable evidence. There’s nothing that could convince someone who doesn’t want to be convinced. But there is an abundance of clues that would give the wanting believer something to hold on to.Jonathan Safran Foer / quote ↗
06c. 1977 ADHe chose illness, because he knew of no other way to be seen. Not even by those looking at him.Jonathan Safran Foer / quote ↗
07c. 1977 ADIt is best if the guard is in love with America and wants to overawe the American by being a premium guard. This kind of guard thinks that he will encounter the American again one day in America, and that the American will offer to take him to a Chicago Bulls game, and buy him blue jeans and whitebread and delicate toilet paper. This guard dreams of speaking Englishwithout an accent and obtaining a wife with an unmalleable bosom. This guard will confess that he does not love where he lives.The other kind of guard is also in love with America, but he will hate the American for being an American. This is worst. This guard knows he will never go to America, and knows that he will never meet the American again. He will steal from the American, and terror the American, only to teach that he can.Jonathan Safran Foer / quote ↗
08c. 1977 ADLong before man traveled into space, rabbis debated how one would observe Shabbat there-not because they anticipated space travel but because Buddhists strive to live with questions and Jews would rather die.Jonathan Safran Foer / quote ↗
09c. 1977 ADNot 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 / quote ↗
10c. 1977 ADHe looked so much like me, I could tell that he saw it, too, we shared the smile of recognizing ourselves in each other, how many imposters do I have? DO we all make the same mistakes, or has one of us gotten it right, or even just a bit less wrong, am I the imposter?Jonathan Safran Foer / quote ↗
11c. 1977 ADshe also liked to remember that there could be no such thing as an intentional imperfection. People are always mistaking something that looks good for something that feels good.Jonathan Safran Foer / quote ↗
12c. 1977 ADI once went to report on a village in Russia, a community of artists who were forced to flee the cities! I'd heard that paintings hung everywhere! I heard you couldn't see the walls through all of the paintings! They'd painted the ceilings, the 82plates, the windows, the lampshades! Was it an act of rebellion! An act of expression! Were the paintings good, or was that beside the point! I needed to see it for myself, and I needed to tell the world about it! I used to live for reporting like that! 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!Jonathan Safran Foer / quote ↗
14c. 1977 ADIn my dream, people apologized for things that were about to happen, and lit candles by inhaling.Jonathan Safran Foer / quote ↗
15c. 1977 ADI got tired, I told him. Not worn out, but worn through. Like one of those wives who wakes up one morning and says I can't bake any more bread.You never bake bread, he wrote, and we were still joking.Then it's like I woke up and baked bread, I said, and we were joking even then. I wondered will there come a time when we won't be joking? And what would it look like? And how would that feel?When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calender that showed the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did. Where the smoke from the chimney ended. How an overturned bottle rested at the edge of a table.I spent my life learning to feel less.Every day I felt less.Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.Jonathan Safran Foer / quote ↗
16c. 1977 ADI spent my life learning to feel less. Every day I felt less. Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?Jonathan Safran Foer / quote ↗
17c. 1977 ADIt 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.Jonathan Safran Foer / quote ↗
18c. 1977 ADHumans 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 years after an offense, whisper, fear themselves, interpret dreams, hide their genitalia, shave, bury time capsules, and can choose not to eat something for reasons of conscience. The justifications for eating animals and for not eating them are often identical: we are not them.Jonathan Safran Foer / quote ↗
19c. 1977 ADA simple trick from the backyard astronomer: if you are having trouble seeing something, look slightly away from it. The most light-sensitive parts of our eyes (those we need to see dim objects) are on the edges of the region we normally use for focusing. Eating animals has an invisible quality. Thinking about dogs, and their relationship to the animals we eat, is one way of looking askance and making something invisible visible.Jonathan Safran Foer / quote ↗
20c. 1977 ADThe choice-obsessed modern West is probably more accommodating to individuals who choose to eat differently than any other culture has ever been, but ironically, the utterly unselective omnivore - “I’m easy; I’ll eat anything” - can appear more socially sensitive than the individual who tries to eat in a way that is good for society. Food choices are determined by many factors, but reason (even consciousness) is not generally high on the list.Jonathan Safran Foer / quote ↗
21c. 1977 ADBefore child labor laws, there were businesses that treated their ten-year-old employees well. society didn’t ban child labor because it’s impossible to imagine children working in a good environment, but because when you give that much power to businesses over powerless individuals, it’s corrupting. When we walk around thinking we have a greater right to eat an animal than the animal has a right to live without suffering, it’s corrupting.Jonathan Safran Foer / quote ↗
22c. 1977 ADThe persistence of the story of animal consent into the contemporary era tells of a human appreciation of the stakes, and a desire to do the right thing.Jonathan Safran Foer / quote ↗
23c. 1977 ADOur 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 engagement with the problem is.Jonathan Safran Foer / quote ↗
24c. 1977 ADWe 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 / quote ↗
