Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

Then everyone leaves, and you are left, each night, to your own devices with a crowd of interesting people - most of whom you don't know - sitting in the dark.

I walked around the block twice, passed 200 people and failed to see a human being.

She missed the built environment of New York City. It was only in an urban landscape, amid straight lines and architecture, that she could situate herself in human time and history. She missed people. She missed human intrigue, drama and power struggles. She needed her own species, not to talk to, necessarily, but just to be among, as a bystander in a crowd or an anonymous witness.

Strangers are an endangered species.

People are the nature of the city, and you can feel it in the pavement.

A million faces at my feet but all I see are dark eyes.

He left the drapes open, watched the lights of the cars and of the fast food joints through the window glass, comforted to know there was another world out there, one he could walk to anytime he wanted.

But 'midst the crowd, the hum, the shock of men, To hear, to see, to feel, and to possess, And roam along, the world's tired denizen, With none who bless us, none whom we can bless.

I looked about for some of my acquaintance, but in vain, for I saw not one person that I knew, which is very odd, for all the world seemed there.

As I lounged in the Park, or strolled down Piccadilly, I used to look at everyone who passed me, and wonder, with mad curiosity, what sort of lives they led. some of them fascinated me. Others filled me with terror.

There are so many people in the world, and I want to know them all but I don’t even know my next-door neighbor’s name.

There are all these people here I don't know by sight or by name. And we pass alongside each other and don't have any connection. And they don't know me and I don't know them. And now I'm leaving town and there are all these people I will never know.

The most important thing is a person. A person who incites your curiosity and feeds your curiosity; and machines cannot do that in the same way that people can.

What now on the other hand makes people sociable is their incapacity to endure solitude and thus themselves.

If you were drifting with a thousand other people, could you really still say you were lost?

I never go out, ever. And I think that's why I've been craving human connection so badly, and in a way, I'm excited to go on tour to be around people all the time.

The truth is, we value your company, for want of any other. We have been left so much to our own devices—after a while one welcomes the uncertainty of being left to other people's.

There were people everywhere on the city street, but the stranger could not have been more alone if it were empty.

What I write is emotionally honest and truthful as the human experience can be, to make people feel less alone, or at least that's the hope.

For a crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love.

Sometimes, the loneliness probably got to be too much and anyone seemed better than no one.

Thanks to the greatly improved possibility of communication, we overrate its importance. Even stronger, we underrate the importance of isolation.

I don't want to sound like some old person pining for how things used to be, because I'm not. But walking down the street, for example, used to be a public activity; you'd see the other people.

You were one person alive and your brain was encased in a skull. There were other people out there. It took effort to be connected.