Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

A book had always been a door to another world... a world much more interesting and fantastical than reality. But she had finally discovered that life could be even more wonderful than fantasy. And that love could fill the real world with magic.

My lack of access to the real world has been replaced completely by books, and it can’t be healthy to live in a land of happily ever afters.

All true readers have a book, a moment when real life is never going to be able to compete with fiction again.

My home was in a pleasant place outside of Philadelphia. But I really lived, truly lived, somewhere else. I lived within the covers of books.

I think I was born with the impression that what happened in books was much more reasonable, and interesting, and real, in some ways, than what happened in life.

I wanted to find a place to hide from all of it, where the nightmares and the rivers and reality couldn't find me. For me, that place was always inside a book.

Books are packaged dreams.

My mother lived her life through movies and books - she read everything there was to read. And she read to me every night. I never went to sleep without her reading to me. And she fantasized about the book and she would talk about it, the place, and you would think that after she read the book and after she told you stories about it, that she had actually been there. I learned about story from her, and I learned the value of a great story, and the value of great characters.

Unlike television, reading does not swallow the senses or dictate thought. Reading stimulates the ecology of the imagination. Can you remember the wonder you felt when first reading The Jungle Book or Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn? Kipling’s world within a world; Twain’s slow river, the feel of freedom and sand on the secret island, and in the depths of the cave?

A book is a device to ignite the imagination.

I leapt eagerly into books. The characters’ lives were so much more interesting than the lonely heartbeat of my own.

Even as a kid, my memories are of books taking me out of myself.

The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one's mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.

Books are for people who wish they were somewhere else.

I was alone as a child. I lived in fairytales, adventures, Shakespeare. They are the friends, my books.

One of the great things about books is you can afford to do anything.

In my schoolboy reveries, we were always two fugitives riding on the spine of a book, eager to escape into worlds of fiction and secondhand dreams.

Only in books the flat and final happens, Only in dreams we meet and interlock.

I was never bored because I always had a book. So I had a doorway into another world or another universe. It was great.

I really, really wanted to lose awareness of the here and now. The best way for me to do that was bury myself in a book.

There is so much goodness in real life- do let us keep it out of our books.

Nothin’s real scary except in books.

As a youngster I was a great dreamer, reading many books of adventure and walking lonely miles with my head in the clouds.

I guess I get enough real life, in real life, so that's why I like things that are more extreme.

Books are the perfect Time Machine. By the simple act of opening a book you can, in an instant, be travelling up a jungle river without once being bitten by mosquitoes, or you can almost die of thirst in the desert while holding a cold drink in your hand, or dine in the finest restaurants and never have to worry about paying the bill, or ride the wild country of our western frontier and never worry about losing your scalp to a raiding party.