Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

Reading and discovering fiction has taught me how to empathise, understand falling in love and all those complex relationships that people have to deal with.

Why don't people take the trouble to let you know that they are alive? It is so much more important. The whole system is wrong. No sooner do I die, than all the flowers I have ever longed for in life pour in.

Love leaves legacy. How you treated other people, not your wealth or accomplishments, is the most enduring impact you can leave on earth.

The only thing that matters, at the end of a stay on earth, is how well did we love, what was the quality of our love?

Why, Robert Singh often wondered, did we give our hearts to friends whose life spans are so much shorter than our own?

The more one does and sees and feels, the more one is able to do, and the more genuine may be one's appreciation of fundamental things like home, and love, and understanding companionship.

Every first thing is always a miracle. The first person you fall in love with. The first letter you receive. The first stone you throw. And in my conception of the novel, the letter becomes important. But what's more important is the fact that we need to continue to tell each other stories.

The one thing we can never get enough of is love. And the one thing we never give enough is love.

The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in.

My mother is not a model. She is not perfect. That awareness is part of learning to love someone. Predicting the actions of someone is an act of love. We persist, even when we get it wrong. That's the beauty of love.

If you distill the essence of everything, what life is about, every single one of us is given a short moment in time on this planet, and we all have one universal need and desire, and that is to be loved and to love. And to deny that for your own political expediency, I don't want to live in that column. It ain't worth it.

I don't want our youth to become anti-romantic. We have to make room for the soul.

I think that our view of love and family informs our work, the way we empathize with people.

I think really good drama comes down to real human emotion. That's what makes us all tick, and that's what I've always been drawn to when it comes to scripts is real human emotion and dealing with that.

We live our whole lives, and in our dying moment, we have to ask ourselves, 'What did we really care about? What impact did we make on the world?' The older I get, the more I realize the answers have to do with how we affect and love the people around us.

I think that the most important thing we have is our ability communicate and love other humans.

There's nobody you can't love once you know their story. I believe that to be, in the majority, true.

Every now and then, I am reminded it's not always about politics. It's about people.

Unless we give part of ourselves away, unless we can live with other people and understand them and help them, we are missing the most essential part of our own human lives.

There are far too many people for us to think about each of them during our short stay on earth—like the thousands of books in a library we haven’t time to read in an afternoon. But this is no excuse to cease browsing. For every now and then, we find that one book that reaches us deep inside and introduces us to ourselves. And, in someone else’s story, we come to understand our own.

I think I'm really lucky that the things I'm able to love - people, animals - it's like the more you put yourself into it, the more you get out of it.

We are ordinarily so indifferent to people that when we have invested one of them with the possibility of giving us joy, or suffering, it seems as if he must belong to some other universe, he is imbued with poetry.

One person caring about another represents life's greatest value.

Social media is fine, but we need to put the phones down and look somebody in the eye. Talk to your neighbor. Talk to your community. Especially talk to the one you love. It's all about connection. It's hard, but it's ultimately what gives us meaning in the world.

Money is not a substitute for tenderness, and power is not a substitute for tenderness. I can tell you, as I'm sitting here dying, when you most need it, neither money nor power will give you the feeling you're looking for, no matter how much of them you have."