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" My wife and I have chosen to bring up our children as vegetarians. In another time or place, we might have made a different decision. But the realities of our present moment compelled us to make that choice. "

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" It's a good rule of thumb, it seems to me: if you're not allowed to see where something comes from, don't put it in your mouth. "

Jonathan Safran Foer

Your

Mouth

See

" There's never been a culture that wasn't obsessed with food. The sort of sad thing is that our obsession is no longer with food, but with the price of food. "

" I will never come around to the idea of an anthropomorphic God. I'm also uncomfortable with the word 'God'... I'm agnostic about the answer and I'm agnostic about the question. "

" In America right now, we use words like 'smart' to talk about bombs. American rhetoric is grounded in ideas of capital-G Good, capital-E Evil, and it's very clear who is on which side. But in a book you can do just the opposite. You can use all lower-case words. "

" Fiction works when it makes a reader feel something strongly. "

" The kind of funny irony is that a lot of people talk about ethical meat eating as if it's a way to care about things, but also not to alienate yourself from the rest of the world. But it's so much more alienating than vegetarianism. "

" It's hard to draw clear lines between writing and life and I don't think it is necessary to or necessarily good to. "

" It's rarely talked about, but hunting for sport is just about as vile as we humans get. "

" People always ask what a book is about, as if it has to be about something. I don't want to write books that lend themselves to that sort of description. My books are more a kind of breaking-down. "

" My children not only inspired me to reconsider what kind of eating animal I would be, but also shamed me into reconsideration. "

Jonathan Safran Foer

Kind

Only

" Maybe one day the world will change, that we'll be in a luxurious position of being able to debate whether or not it's inherently wrong to eat animals, but the question doesn't matter right now. "

" Books are slow, books are quiet. The Internet is fast and loud. "

" The more exposure people have to the realities of factory farming, the more we will see people rejecting it. It's already happening. "

" People who care about animals tend to care about people. They don't care about animals to the exclusion of people. Caring is not a finite resource and, even more than that, it's like a muscle: the more you exercise it, the stronger it gets. "

" We shouldn't be intimidated by someone else's idea of perfection if it will prevent us from taking steps we actively want to take. "

" I have made my own choice, which is vegetarianism, but it's not the choice I'm imposing on anybody else. "

" I see bad stuff on the street all the time that I don't do anything about. I do bad stuff myself all the time. The goal is not to somehow be perfect - that's silly, that's naive. The goal is to just recognize there are choices in front of us, and to try to make better ones. "

" There is an overabundance of rational reasons to say no to factory-farmed meat: It is the No. 1 cause of global warming, it systematically forces tens of billions of animals to suffer in ways that would be illegal if they were dogs, it is a decisive factor in the development of swine and avian flus, and so on. "

" It seems entirely possible to me that horrible things can be going on without us becoming horrible people. "

Jonathan Safran Foer

People

Possible

" How could this world be so unlike the world that I believed I was living in? I can't describe it. Do I not want to describe it, or do I simply not possess the vocabulary? "

" The Torah is the foundational text for Jewish law, but the Haggadah is our book of living memory. We are not merely telling a story here. We are being called to a radical act of empathy. Here we are, embarking on an ancient, perennial attempt to give human lives - our lives - dignity. "

" It would be refreshing to have a politician try to defend guns without any reference to the Second Amendment, but on the merits of guns. "

" We say no to lots of things that would please us. I would like to punch people every now and then, but I don't. I would like to have something for free rather than pay for it. I would like to skip to the front of the line... I don't mean to brush aside the taste of meat, which is a powerful attraction. But its power is not without limit. "

" I see myself as someone who makes things. Definitions have never done anything but constrain. "

" What the world does not need is a Haggadah that pats itself on the back. It needs a Haggadah that gets out of the way, that starts a conversation and gets out of the way. "

" Feeding my children is not like feeding myself: it matters more. "

Jonathan Safran Foer

Children

Matters

" There is no greater gift than time. "

" We've made science experiments of ourselves and our children. "

" Why wouldn't - how couldn't - an author care about how his or her books look? "

" The question, I've come to think, is not what inspires one to change, but what inspires one to remain changed. "