Few people sufficiently appreciate the colossal task of feeding a world of billions of omnivores who demand meat with their potatoes.
Thanksgiving is the holiday that encompasses all others. All of them from Martin Luther King Day to Arbor Day to Christmas to Valentine's Day are in one way or another about being thankful.
The world is a big place " he said "but so is the inside of an apartment!
[She] always knew he was a fiction but believed in him anyway.
If the thrill of hunting were in the hunt or even in the marksmanship a camera would do just as well.
Dear Anna we will live in a home with no walls so that everywhere we go will be our home.
The animals are those things that God likes but doesn't love.
Not responding is a response--we are equally responsible for what we don't do. In the case of animal slaughter to throw your hands in the air is to wrap your fingers around a knife handle.
Every factory-farmed animal is as a practice treated in ways that would be illegal if it were a dog or a cat.
...only someone who'd never been an animal would put up a sign saying not to feed them....
I need an office so I can have a place where I don't write.
I ran rather than walked anxious to lose my way. All I wanted was to be unsure.
They do not desire anything more than everything they have known.
I am willing to be annoying if that's what was necessary.
Everyone is always in need of something that another person can give be it undivided attention a kind word or deep empathy. There is no better use of a life than to be attentive to such needs.
The philosopher Elaine Scarry has observed that "beauty always takes place in the particular." Cruelty on the other hand prefers abstraction.
If it had and answer it wouldn't really be love would it?
People around the world were moving from one place to another. No one was staying.
August has passed and yet summer continues by force to grow days. They sprout secretly between the chapters of the year covertly included between its pages.
As a writer putting words on the page is how I pay attention.
I hated the gnawing longing that accompanied having everything.
Let love write on you for awhile.
I'm less worried about accomplishment - as younger people always can't help but be - and more concerned with spending my time well spending time with my family and reading learning things.
What is being awake if not interpreting our dreams or dreaming if not interpreting our wake?
She avoids mirrors and lifts a powerful telescope to find herself.
Shyness is when you turn your head away from something you want.
While it is always possible to wake a person who's sleeping no amount of noise will wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.
Family are the people who must make you feel ashamed when you are deserving of shame.
You write to please yourself you write to move yourself to engage yourself in the asking of questions that are important to you.
The best books are the ones that ask the most questions.
Literature has drawn a funny perimeter that other art forms haven't.
It would be possible in theory for life and art to be reversed.
I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love.
Just because you're an atheist that doesn't mean you wouldn't love for things to have reasons for why they are.
...accepting the compromise of the way we have been the way we are and the way we will likely be...may we live together in unwavering love and good health amen.
I'm not funny. People assume that because my books are funny I'll be funny in real life. It's the inevitable disappointment of meeting me.
We burned with love for ourselves all of us starters of the fire we suffered- our love was the affliction for which only our love was the cure.
Our love was the affliction for which only our love was the cure.
Only now do I understand the war against boredom the lost cause of empty hours of empty days and nights.
I hope you never think about anything as much as I think about you.
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.
I think after you live it's like before you lived.
I'm so afraid of losing something I love that I refuse to love anything
She brushed her eyelashes against his chest.
What do babies dream of? She must be dreaming of the before-life just as I dream of the afterlife.
But what she was really trying to say was this: I like music better than anything in the world after you.
Do you have any coffee?'...'It stunts my growth and I'm afraid of death.
Cruelty depends on an understanding of cruelty and the ability to choose against it. Or to choose to ignore it.
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.
The only thing more painful than being an active forgetter is to be an inert rememberer.
I can't even say 'hair pie '' I told him 'unless I'm talking about an actual pie made out of rabbits....
Your dad didn't die so I won't be able to explain it to you.
I was more alone than if I had been alone.
To feel alone is to be alone.
There is nothing wrong with compromising. Even if you compromise almost everything.
Jed Perl writes precisely and ecstatically. Antoine' s Alphabet is a history and a fairy tale a work of criticism and a work of art.
She maintained a careful balance by her window never allowing the men to come too close never allowing them to stray too far.
These little daily choices that we're so used to thinking are irrelevant are the most important thing we do all day long.
When it comes to meat change is almost always cast as an absolute. You are a vegetarian or you are not.
It was not the feeling of completeness I so needed but the feeling of not being empty.
At the end of my dream Eve put the apple back on the branch. The tree went back into the ground. It became a sapling which became a seed.
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.
Writers now are putting total faith in designers at Apple and Amazon. It's almost like a race-car driver having no input into how cars are designed.
The American dream itself is declining.
People shouldn't be allowed to get married until it's too late to have kids.
I am not a bad person. I am a good person who has lived in a bad time." Alex's grandfather..Everything is Illuminated
As long as I am thinking I am alive.
The factory farm has succeeded by divorcing people from their food eliminating farmers and ruling agriculture by corporate fiat.
Animal agriculture makes a 40% greater contribution to global warming than all transportation in the world combined; it is the number one cause of climate change.
Weeks passed like boats waiting to sail into the starless dawn we were full of aimless endless darkness.
I started carrying blank books like this one around which I would fill with all the things I couldn't say...
It was getting hard to keep all the things I didn't know inside me.
My dream went all the way back to the beginning. The rain rose into the clouds and the animals descended the ramp.
I want an infinitely blank book and the rest of time.
I want an infinitely blank book and the rest of time......why didn't I learn to treat everything like it was the last time my greatest regret is how much I believed in the future.
She laughed enough to migrate an entire flock of birds. That was how she said yes
I watched the sheets breathe when she breathed like how Dad used to say that trees inhale when people exhale because I was too young to understand the truth about biological processes.
Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.
Sometimes I can feel my bones straining
Marriage is like a chess match is initiated and the board expands over time until it takes up all of a life.
The sky slowly pulled up its blue dress to reveal night.
AND IF WE ARE TO STRIVE FOR A BETTER FUTURE MUSTN'T WE BE FAMILIAR AND RECONCILED WITH OUR PAST?
One of the greatest opportunities to live our values-or betray them-lies in the food we put on our plates.
Consumers are going to have get used to eating less meat - to paying more for better quality meat and eating significantly less of it.
I am an on-and-off vegetarian. Sometimes on mostly off. I think it is better to be a vegetarian but occasionally the call of the hot dog overpowers my ethics.
It was one of the best days of my life a day during which I lived my life and didn't think about my life at all.
Is there really anyone besides Rudy Giuliani who prefers the new Times Square?
I got tired I told him. Not worn out but worn through. Like one of those wives who wakes up one morning and says I can't bake any more bread.
It's hard to draw clear lines between writing and life and I don't think it is necessary to or necessarily good to.
Years were passing through the spaces between moments.
I zipped myself all the way into the sleeping bag of myself not because I was hurt and not because I had broken something but because they were cracking up.
The writing itself is no big deal. The editing and even more than that the self-doubt is excruciatingly impossible.
His voice was handsome and broken like a cobblestone street.
She extended a hand that I didn't know how to take so I broke its fingers with my silence.
It broke my heart into more pieces than my heart was made of why can't people say what they mean at the time?
I've never particularly liked bankers.
Sometimes I imagined stitching all of our little touches together. How many hundreds of thousands of fingers brushing against each other does it take to make love? Why does anyone ever make love?
Why didn't he say goodbye? I gave myself a bruise. Why didn't he say 'I love you'?
The bruises go away and so does how you hate and so does the feeling that everything you receive from life is something you have earned.
When a book remembers we remember. It reminds you that you have a body. So many of the things we may think of as burdensome are actually the things that make us more human.
Isn't it so weird how the number of dead people is increasing even though the Earth stays the same size so that one day there isn't going to be room to bury anyone anymore?
We looked at each other until it felt like everything would burst into flames
I went to the guest room and pretended to write. I hit the space bar again and again and again. My life story was spaces.
There were things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him. So I buried them and let them hurt me.
I was of the opinion that the past is past and like all that is not now it should remain buried along the side of our memories.
Profound bottomless self-doubt - it has no value - what's the point? In a way it takes up as much time as anything else.
I got incredibly heavy boots about how relatively insignificant life is and how compared to the universe and compared to time it didn't even matter if I existed at all.
A few weeks after the worst day I started writing lots of letters. I don't know why but it was one of the only things that made my boots lighter.
I thought for a minute and then I got heavy heavy boots.
Everything that's born has to die which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds but they're all on fire and we're all trapped.
Succotash my Balzac dipshiitake.
In truth I was manufacturing a brick wall of shits.
Also I designed a pretty fascinating bracelet where you put a rubber band around your favorite book of poems for a year and then you take it off and wear it.
Time was passing like a hand waving from a train that I wanted to be on.
Maybe I'll try to be more patient with morons.
I tried to think about other things. I tried to invent optimistic inventions. But the pessimistic ones were extremely loud.
If we communicated with something like music we would never be misunderstood because there is nothing in music to understand.
Every moment before this one depends on this one.
Being with him made my brain quiet. I didn't have to invent a thing.
Please be truthful but also please be benevolent please.
Why I'm Not Where You Are
Not responding is a response - we are equally responsible for what we don't do.
That's the nice thing about being a vegetarian. You don't have to be neurotic. Selective omnivores have to be neurotic. Personally I don't have time for all that; I don't want to get into it.
Isn't it strange how upset people get about a few dozen baseball players taking growth hormones when we're doing what were doing to our food animals and feeding them to our children?
She was like a drowning person flailing reaching for anything that might save her. Her life was an urgent desperate struggle to justify her life.
I don't think that there are any limits to how excellent we could make life seem.
The mistakes I've made are dead to me. But I can't take back the things I never did.
Nothing is beautiful and true.
I never confused what I had with what I was.
I love the idea of books being more than books or being rather something other than books.
There's no being wrong in seeing something in art only being disagreed with.
There are worse things worse than being like us. Look at least we're alive.
The only thing worse than being sad is for others to know you are sad.
Highs and lows make you feel that things matter but they're nothing." "So what's something?" "Being reliable is something. Being good.
When I looked at you my life made sense. Even the bad things made sense. They were necessary to make you possible.
What's so horrible about being dead forever and not feeling anything and not even dreaming? What's so great about feeling and dreaming?
Because sometimes people who seem goodend up being not as good as you might have hoped.
Sometimes people who seem good end up being not as good as you might have hoped you know?
But come. No explaining or mending. Be beside me somewhere.
I could not believe in a God that would challenge faith like this.
And she would say "Today you believe in God?" And he would say "Today I believe in love".
I regret how much I believed in the future.
If it weren't my life I wouldn't have believed it.
If god exists he is not to be believed in.
I believed him. I was not stupid. I was his wife.
We believed in our grandmother's cooking more fervently than we believed in God.
Memories are small prayers to God if we believed in that sort of thing.
All really great artists Jackson Pollack John Cage Beckett or Joyce - you are never indifferent to them.
Why do beautiful songs make you sad?' 'Because they aren't true.' 'Never?' 'Nothing is beautiful and true.
I desperately wish I had my tambourine with me now because even after everything I'm still wearing heavy boots and sometimes it helps to play a good beat
How beautiful is forgetting! What relief it would be for the world to lose some of its contents.
I am sure people tell you this constantly but if you looked up 'incredibly beautiful' in the dictionary there would be a picture of you.
You have to do something bad to do something good.
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.
Then I have some bad news for you because humans are going to destroy each other as soon as it becomes easy enough to which will be very soon.
I beg you no matter what happens no matter where you go in life or how many millions you make no matter anything I beg you: never buy a German car.
I will describe my eyes and then begin the story. My eyes are blue and resplendent. Now I will begin the story.
i couldn't speak the language of his feelings
People don't care enough. They don't get worked up enough. They don't get angry enough. They don't get passionate enough. I'd rather somebody hate what I do than be indifferent to it.
...people with nothing to declare carry the most.
Everything is to protect you. I exist in case you need to be protected.
In the morning when the nothing vase casts a something shadow like the memory of someone you've lost what can you say about that?
You can call your turkey organic and torture it daily.
She saw through the shell of me into the center of me
Each day has been chained to the previous one. But the weeks have wings. Anyone who believes that a second is faster than a decade did not live my life.
I wish my days could be washed away like the chalk lines of my days.
It can be challenge enough to have to eat with myself.
In my family Father is the world champion at ending conversations.
With writing we have second chances.
Compassion is a muscle that gets stronger with use and the regular exercise of choosing kindness over cruelty would change us.
Factory farmers talk about their desire to feed the world. That's not what they're doing. They're feeding the world with really really cheap stuff.
I love sushi I love fried chicken I love steak. But there is a limit to my love
Do you eat chicken because you are familiar with the scientific literature on them and have decided that their suffering doesn't matter or do you do it because it tastes good?
I said I kicked a French chicken in the stomach once." "Huh?" "It said 'Oeuf.'" "What is that?" "It's a joke. Do you want to hear another or have you already had un oeuf?
Chickens can do many things but they cannot make sophisticated deals with humans.
She wanted nothing more than someone to miss to touch with whom to speak like a child with whom to be a child.
I have no need for the past I thought like a child. I did not consider that the past might have a need for me.
Parents are always more knowledgeable than their children and children are always smarter than their parents.
We all choose things and we also all choose against things. I want to be the kind of person who chooses for more than chooses against...
I can forgive you for leaving but not for coming back.
We aren't exactly emptying the oceans; it's more like clear-cutting a forest with thousands of species to create massive fields with one type of soybean.
Which then brings us closer to what we want to communicate: saying what we intend or trying to say the opposite?
Am I such a bad person for dreaming of a world that ends when I do? I don't mean the world ending with respect to me but every set of eyes closing with mine.
Succotash my cocker spaniel you fudging crevasse-hole dipshiitake!
They learned to hate her unknowability her untouchability the collage of her.
I'm interested in the kind of religion that makes life harder. I'm not so interested in the comforting kind of religion.
Everybody knows the competing identities of people who have kids.
["¦] but I believe that things are extremely complicated and her looking over me was as complicated as anything could ever be. But it was also incredibly simple.
You're incredibly beautiful ' I told her because she was fat so I thought it would be an especially nice compliment and also make her like me again even though I was sexist.
It is unrealistic to think you can have an inflexible identity that never has to give or take or make compromises.
When you read something you have written you have to confront some of the lies you have been telling yourself.
Again and again we are confronted with the reality - some might say the problem - of sharing our space with other living things be they dogs trees fish or penguins.
Technology celebrates connectedness but encourages retreat.
Words are capable of making experience more vivid and also of organizing it. They can scare us and they can comfort us.
I see myself as someone who makes things. Definitions have never done anything but constrain.
The only way to overcome sadness is to consume it.
Was his death an essential stage in the continuation of his life?
The end of the world has come often and continues to come.
It was terrible. All of the things we couldn't share. The room was filled with conversations we weren't having.
I write because I want to end my loneliness. Books make people less alone. That before and after everything else is what books do. They show us that conversations are possible across distances.
I'm not better than anyone and I'm not trying to convince people to live by my standards of what's right. I'm trying to convince them to live by their own.
For how long could we fail until we surrendered?
I'd lost count of the disappointments.
Thomas! What are you doing!" and I gestured "I thought this was Nothing " covering myself with one of my daybooks and she said "It's Something!
The French who love their dogs sometimes eat their horses. The Spanish who love their horses sometimes eat their cows. The Indians who love their cows sometimes eat their dogs.
We cracked up together which was necessary because she loved me again.
There are a lot of things that we crave there are a lot of things that would make us perhaps more fulfilled in a sensory way that we just say no to.
Food is not rational. Food is culture habit craving and identity.
We live in a world made up more of story than stuff. We are creatures of memory more than reminders of love more than likes.
I wanted to cry but I didn't I probably should have cried I should have drowned us there in the room ending our suffering.
It is my great hope that our paths however long and winding will cross again.
It's much easier to be cruel than one might think.
Only humans can cry tears.
It was the first time I had ever made love. I wondered if he knew that. It felt like crying. I wondered Why does anyone ever make love?
Food is not just what we put in our mouths to fill up; it is culture and identity. Reason plays some role in our decisions about food but it's rarely driving the car.
I'm deeply curious about Jewish things. I've toyed around with the idea of going to rabbinical school.
For a long time I thought I would like to be a doctor. Such a good profession. So explicitly good. Never a waste of time.
I took the world into me rearranged it and sent it back out as a question: "Do you like me?
I am doing something I hate for you. This is what it means to be in love.
We eat as sons and daughters as families as communities as generations as nations and increasingly as a globe. We can't stop our eating from radiating influence even if we want to.
Why does watching a dog be a dog fill one with happiness?
What does it remember like?
Sometimes one simply wants to disappear.
I imagine a line a white line painted on the sand and on the ocean from me to you.
As we drove I imagined we were standing still and the world was coming toward us.
I kept thinking how they were all names of dead people and how names are basically the only thing dead people keep.
She is deranged but so so playful.
Life is scarier than death.
If I'd been someone else in a different world I'd've done something different but I was myself and the world was the world so I was silent.
How did her life live itself without her.
When you look up 'hilarious' in the dictionary there's a picture of you.
I think there's going to be something that happens now where books move in two directions one toward digitized formats and one toward remembering what's nice about the physicality of them.
But I dig Negroes. I dig them all the way.
Everything is the way it is because everything was the way it was.
It has shown me that everything is illuminated in the light of the past. It is always along the side of us...on the inside looking out.
Why is taste the crudest of our senses exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other senses?
The books could be completely worthless and things we don't even read now could be considered the most important books.
She was with me. She did all of those things and so many more things I would never tell anyone and she never even loved me. Now that's love.
My test for writing is always is this fun or does it feel like a job? Is it moving me? Or am I just fulfilling my own expectations - or even worse somebody else's?
I woke up once in the middle of the night and Buckminster's paws were on my eyelids. He must have been feeling my nightmares.
I know lots and lots and lots of vegetarians who think it's perfectly all right to kill animals for food to eat but don't do it because they think all the ways in which it's done are wrong.
We had everything to say to each other but no ways to say it
I wanted to hit him. I wanted to hold him. I wanted to shout myself into his ear.
I don't mind if smiles come at my expense I'm a small price to pay.
We shared the smile of recognizing ourselves in each other.
If we were to one day encounter a form of life more powerful and intelligent than our own and it regarded us as we regard fish what would be our argument against being eaten?
The more exposure people have to the realities of factory farming the more we will see people rejecting it. It's already happening.
...Sadness of not knowing enough words to [express what you mean]...
We've made science experiments of ourselves and our children.
There has yet to be a human to survive a span of history without at least one end of the world.
The end of suffering does not justify the suffering and so there is no end to suffering.
In the end everyone loses everyone.
People hurt each other. That's what people do.
It made me start to wonder if there were other people so lonely so close. I thought about "Eleanor Rigby." It's true where do they all come from? And where do they all belong?
In high school I became a vegetarian more times than I can now remember most often as an effort to claim some identity in a world of people whose identities seemed to come effortlessly.
Oh I'd say I like a meal as much as anybody. But I find a certain kind of foodiness silly gluttonous and embarrassing.
Tomorrow was over the horizon and would take an entire day to reach.
It seems entirely possible to me that horrible things can be going on without us becoming horrible people.
One hundred years of joy can be erased in one second
...and when is enough proof enough?
She let out a laugh and then she put her hand over her mouth like she was angry at herself for forgetting her sadness.
The paper the stapler the staples the tape. It makes me sick. Physical things. Forty years of loving someone becomes staples and tape.
The gift is for you...The surprise is for me.
It's possible to make things that aren't just money-makers. Something wonderful for its own sake.
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.
Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
One day you will do things for me that you hate. That is what it means to be family.
Why didn't I learn to treat everything like it was the last time. My greatest regret was how much I believed in the future.
She had fallen in love so many times that she began to suspect she was not falling in love at all but doing something much more ordinary.
The images of his infinite pasts and infinite futures washed over him as he waited paralyzed in the present.
Grandfather kicked the stop pedal and my face gave a high-five to the front window.
I saw Herschel and he saw me and we stood next to each other because that is what friends do in the presence of evil or love.
Feeding my children is not like feeding myself: it matters more.
Hunting will never feed lots of people; it will always be a hobby.
I spent my life learning to feel less.
Feathers filled the small room. Our laughter kept the feathers in the air. I thought about birds. Could they fly is there wasn't someone somewhere laughing?
...sometimes you have to put your fears in order...
Fiction works when it makes a reader feel something strongly.
People who become used to saying little become used to feeling little.
Factory farming of course does not cause all the world's problems but is is remarkable just how many of them intersect there.
When we eat factory-farmed meat we live literally on tortured flesh. Increasingly that tortured flesh is becoming our own.
The secret was a hole in the middle of me that every happy thing fell into.
Instead of singing in the shower I would write out the lyrics of my favourite songs the ink would turn the water blue or red or green and the music would run down my legs.
Books are slow books are quiet. The Internet is fast and loud.
...the meaning of my thoughts started to float away from me like leaves that fall from a tree into a river I was the tree the world was the river.
I said 'I need to know how he died.' He flipped back and pointed at 'Why?' So I can stop inventing how he died. I'm always inventing.
I flipped back through the pad of paper while I thought about what Stephen Hawking would do next.
But I still couldn't figure out what it all meant. The more I found out the less I understood.
Memory was supposed to fill the time but it made time a hole to be filled.
Grandfather informs me that is not possible.
Mom told me "It probably gets pretty lonely to be Grandma don't you think?" I told her "It probably gets pretty lonely to be anyone
Why do I write? It's not that I want people to think I am smart or even that I am a good writer. I write because I want to end my loneliness.
It's hard to say goodbye to the place you've lived. It can be as hard as saying goodbye to a person.
Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?
I spent my life learning to feel less. Every day I felt less. Is that growing old? Or is it something worse? You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.
What were we spending so much time doing if not getting to know each other?
It took me as long as I had known him to get rid of all of his words. Like turning an hourglass over.
She was so beautiful like someone who you will never meet but always dream of meeting like someone who is too good for you.
Oh ' she said. 'I have never seen a Jew before. Can I see his horns?
This is love she thought isn't it? When you notice someone's absence and hate that absence more than anything? More even than you love his presence?
...he was leaving me. I wondered if I should stop him. If I should wrestle him to the ground and force him to love me. I wanted to hold his shoulders down and shout into his face.
But I knew the truth and that's why I was so sad. Every moment before this one depends on this one. Everything in the history of the world can be proven wrong in one moment.
I felt it very moving to feel his touch and to remember that hands can also show love.
She felt as if she were brimming always producing and hoarding more love inside her. But there was no release.
I can only hold on to the things I want to lose.
The Eskimos have four hundred words for snow and the Jewshave four hundred for schmuck.
So many people enter and leave your life! Hundreds of thousands of people! You have to keep the door open so they can come in! But it also means you have to let them go!
Reality Hunger is more than thought-provoking; it's one of the most beautiful books I've read in a long time.
You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.
I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live.
Things were happening around us but nothing was happening between us.
It's rarely talked about but hunting for sport is just about as vile as we humans get.
Everything else happened - why not the things that could have?
The hardest part of writing is not to get the ideas but to remember why it is important to get them.
I want to talk about God in a literary way. But I think I would have a very hard time praying to God.
I hated myself for going why couldn't I be the kind of person who stays?
She was not crying Which surprised me very much But I understand now That she had found places For her melancholy That were behind more masks Than only her eyes
To remember my values I need to lose certain tastes and find other handles for the memories that they once helped me carry.
The end of suffering does not justify the suffering what a mess I am I thought what a fool how foolish and narrow how worthless how pinched and pathetic how helpless.
Highs and lows make you feel that things matter but they're nothing.
Once you hear something you can never return to the time before you heard it.
She said "Do you have more things that you need or more that you don't need?" I said "It depends on what it means to need.
Be the instrument playing the sound of your life's passing
Love me because love doesn't exist and I have tried everything that does.
I missed you even when I was with you. That's been my problem. I miss what I already have and I surround myself with things that are missing.
I wondered for the first time in my life if life was worth all the work it took to live. What exactly made it worth it?
Ironically the utterly unselective omnivore -- "I'm easy; I'll eat anything" -- can appear more socially sensitive than the individual who tries to eat in a way that is good for society.
In the end everyone loses everyone. There was no invention to get around that.
What if I never stop inventing?
I wanted to protect him which I was sure I could do even if I could not protect myself.
I did not need to know if he could love me. I needed to know if he could need me.
We could imagine all sorts of universes unlike this one but this is the one that happened.
It is not a thing that you can imagine. It only is. After that there can be no imagining.
I realized I was on a something island. 'How did I get here ' I wondered surrounded by Nothing "and how can I get back?
I'm sorry for my inability to let unimportant things go for my inability to hold on to the important things.
The question I've come to think is not what inspires one to change but what inspires one to remain changed.
Yesterday I wanted to turn inside out.
I'd rather somebody hate what I do than be indifferent to it.
I felt that night on that stage under that skull incredibly close to everything in the universe but also extremely alone.
I have made my own choice which is vegetarianism but it's not the choice I'm imposing on anybody else.
We talked about nothing in particular but it felt like we were talking about the most important things...
I would have done anything for him. Maybe that was my sickness.
Something having been done just about everywhere just about always is no kind of justification for doing it now.
It is better to lose than never to have had.
It's a rule that we never listen to sad music we made that rule early on songs are as sad as the listener we hardly ever listen to music.
Songs are as sad as the listener.
We spent our lives making livings.
Love...is the immovability of truth.
It's the tragedy of loving you can't love anything more than something you miss.
I try not to remember the life that I didn't want to lose but lost and have to remember
That's all anyone wants from anyone else not love itself but the knowledge that love is there.
He promised us that everything would be okay. I was a child but I knew that everything would not be okay. That did not make my father a liar. It made him my father.
Nobody likes war not even those who survive it not even the winners.
My life story is the story of everyone I've ever met.
Everyone performs bad actions... A bad person is someone who does not lament his bad actions.
When I was a girl my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much.
I looked at everyone and wondered where they came from and who they missed and what they were sorry for.
Murdering someone would surely prove that you are capable of killing but it wouldn't be the most reasonable way to understand why you shouldn't do it.
Words never mean what we want them to mean.
If nothing matters there's nothing to save.
What about little microphones? What if everyone swallowed them and they played the sounds of our hearts through a little speaker...I wonder if everyone's hearts would start to beat at the same time.
I made up my mind that nothing nothing was going to stop me Not even me.
There's nothing wrong with not understanding yourself.
We are being very nomadic with the truth yes?
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.
I always write out of a need to read something rather than a need to write something.
Whether we change our lives or do nothing we have responded. To do nothing is to do something.
I shook my tambourine the whole time because it helped me remember that even though I was going through different neighborhoods I was still me.
[...]It is as if after surviving so much there was no longer reason to survive.
Nine out of ten significant people have to do with money or war!
Our relationship to the environment matters our relationship to animals matters and our relationship to culture matters.
I think and think and think I"?ve thought myself out of happiness one million times but never once into it.
I put my hand on the doorknob because I thought maybe her hand was on the doorknob on the other side.
The more you love someone he came to think the harder it is to tell them. It surprised him that strangers didn't stop each other on the street to say I love you.
I thought it's a shame that we have to live but it's a tragedy that we get to live only one life because if I'd had two lives I would have spent one of them with her.
I wouldn't want a boy to think I was pretty unless he was the kind of boy who thought I was pretty.
As I've grown older I've grown more convinced there's nothing that shouldn't be talked about. If we think we're protecting each other we're not.
Imagine being served a plate of sushi. But this plate also holds all of the animals that were killed for your serving of sushi. The plate might have to be five feet across.
I didn't feel empty. I wished I'd felt empty. ... I wanted to be empty like an overturned pitcher. But I was full like a stone.
My children not only inspired me to reconsider what kind of eating animal I would be but also shamed me into reconsideration.
Books are for those without real lives he thought. And they are no real replacement.
Sadness of love without release.
I wasn't having second thoughts but I was having thoughts.
I know you look both ways before you cross the street but I want you to look both ways a second time because I told you to.
And also there are so many times when you need to make a quick escape but humans don't have their own wings or not yet anyway so what about a birdseed shirt?
I felt suddenly shy. I was not used to shy. I was used to shame. Shyness is when you turn your head away from something you want. Shame is when you turn your head away from something you do not want.
and i wouldn't say no to something sweet.
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.
In the end everyone loses everyone. There was no invention to get around that and so I felt that night like the turtle that everything else in the universe was on top of.
Try to live so that you can always tell the truth.
...there are only some many times you can utter "It does not hurt" before it begins to hurt even more than the hurt.
Stories about food are stories about us-our history and our values.
....Worthy would-be worlds of words whorls of working wonder.
Time was passing like a hand waving from a train I wanted to be on. I hope you never have to think about anything as much as I think about you.
You are the only one who has understood even a whisper of me and I will tell you that I am the only person who has understood even a whisper of you.
Since the world has changed so much the same values don't lead to the same choices anymore.