Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

The mind that engages in subjects of too great variety becomes confused and weakened.

I sometimes find, and I am sure you know the feeling, that I simply have too many thoughts and memories crammed into my mind.

My brain is like a hard drive. Once you start adding new information, you start cutting off old information.

I get readings, I sometimes get five a week. You'll feel like a schizophrenic by the end of that week. I don't know who I am any more. You'll be in conversation with a friend and start spitting out dialogue.

What's clarity like? Try to remember that funny feeling inside your head when you had math problems too difficult to solve: the faint buzzing noise in your ears, a heaviness on both sides of your skull, and the sensation that your brain is twitching inside your cranium like a fish on the beach. This is the opposite sensation of clarity. Yet for many people of my era, as they aged, this sensation became the dominant sensation of their lives. It was as though day-to-day twentieth century living had become an unsolvable algebraic equation.

Modern man is assailed on every side and almost without interruption by noise - of the radio, of television, of headlines, of advertising and of the cinema - of which the greatest part, far from enlightening the mind, blunts and stultifies it.

Distortion upon distortion: . . . the more one uses the mind, the more confused one becomes.

No, I said. I didn't remember that. There was so much to remember, sometimes the best thing was to forget.

There are probably brilliant people, geniuses, alive today who don't even know how to say, "Hello, how do you do?" because their minds are absorbed with electronic images.

Superfluous words simply spill out when the mind is already full.

I had a naiveté that I would remember the things that I had written already, but I was getting lost in the forest of my own ideas and having to find my way out.

You're using your headphones to drown out your mind

If decade after decade the truth cannot be told, each person's mind begins to roam irretrievably. One's fellow countrymen become harder to understand than Martians.

A false or misunderstood word may create as much disaster as a sudden thoughtless act.

There is so much more information about the scientific world than there was a generation ago that we have all increased our opportunities for ignorance. There are more things not to know. ... The machinery that we deal with is so much more complex that it is possible to become dysfunctional at a much higher level of performance.

Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition.

Words had started swimming off the page, circling my head, the letters doing one-eighties as if they were riding skateboards.

Her mind was an hotel where facts came and went like transient lodgers, without leaving their address behind, and frequently without paying for their board.

The fog of information can drive out knowledge.

We live in a true chaos of contradicting authorities, an age of conformism without community, of proximity without communication.

My poor head is in such a whirl, my mind is all in bits.

We are now at a point in time when the ability to receive, utilize, store, transform and transmit data - the lowest cognitive form - has expanded literally beyond comprehension. Understanding and wisdom are largely forgotten as we struggle under an avalanche of data and information.

They stormed and jeered at one another in long meaningless words of about twenty syllables each.

It is here that I can concentrate my mind upon the Remembered Earth. It is here that I am most conscious of being, here that wonder comes upon my blood, here I want to live forever; and it is no matter that I must die.

My brain's just full of passwords.