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"Find a printer paper and imagine a full-grown bird shaped something like a football with legs standing on it. Imagine 33,000 of these rectangles in a grid. (Broilers are never in cages, and never on multiple levels.) Now enclose the grid with windowless walls and put a ceiling on top. Run in automated (drug-laced) feed, water, heating, and ventilation systems. This is a farm."
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"Chicago happened slowly, like a migraine. First they were driving through countryside, then, imperceptibly, the occasional town became a low suburban sprawl, and the sprawl became the city."
"Summer was full on and the nights hot. It was like lying in warm syrup there in the dark under the viaduct, in the steady whine of gnats and nightbugs."
"The addition of certain chemicals to the atmosphere will destroy wavelengths of light and it may only be a matter of time before one of these wavelengths of light that is critical for human survival is eliminated. This is called: The Extinction Wavelength."
"We are such small, stupid things. For most of my life I thought of nature as the stupid thing: Blind, animal, destructive. We, the humans, were clean and smart and in control: we had wrestled the rest of the world into submission, battered it down, pinned it to a glass slide and the pages of The Bool of Shhh."
"By eating meat we share the responsibility of climate change, the destruction of our forests, and the poisoning of our air and water. The simple act of becoming a vegetarian will make a difference in the health of our planet."
"Whenever they are given the choice, some people choose a bath over a shower; they, too, would like to do their bit to waste water."
"The straw-coated floor crunched beneath her boots, a cool breeze sweeping in from where the roof had been ripped half off thanks to Sorrel's bull. To keep the wyverns from feeling less caged-and so Abraxos could watch the stars, as he liked to do."
"In a natural environment, nature controls the breeding cycles. In the man-made environment, abnormal environmental conditions control the unnatural breeding cycles."
"It's not as though we can keep burning coal in our power plants. Coal is a finite resource, too. We must find alternatives, and it's a better idea to find alternatives sooner then wait until we run out of coal, and in the meantime, put God knows how many trillions of tons of CO2 that used to be buried underground into the atmosphere."
"Tree planting is always a utopian enterprise, it seems to me, a wager on a future the planter doesn't necessarily expect to witness."
Explore more quotes by Jonathan Safran Foer
"I think and think and think, I've thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it."
"I am always sad, I think. Perhaps this signifies that I am not sad at all, because sadness is something lower than your normal disposition, and I am always the same thing. Perhaps I am the only person in the world, then, who never becomes sad. Perhaps I am lucky."
"In sickness and in sickness. That is what I wish for you. Don't seek or expect miracles. There are no miracles. Not anymore. And there are no cures for the hurt that hurts most. There is only the medicine of believing each other's pain, and being present for it."
"AND IF WE ARE TO STRIVE FOR A BETTER FUTURE, MUSTN'T WE BE FAMILIAR AND RECONCILED WITH OUR PAST?"
"Rationally, factory farming is so obviously wrong, in so many ways. In all of my reading and conversations, I've yet to find a credible defense of it. But food is not rational. Food is culture, habit, and identity."
"Parents are always more knowledgeable than their children, and children are always smarter than their parents."
"We 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."
"He chose illness, because he knew of no other way to be seen. Not even by those looking at him."
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