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And So It Was When Anyone Tried To Speak: Their Minds Would Become Tangled In Remembrance. Words Became Floods Of Thought With No Beginning Or End, And Would Drown The Speaker Before He Could Reach The Life Raft Of The Point He Was Trying To Make. It Was Impossible To Remember What One Meant, What, After All Of The Words, Was Intended.

-Jonathan Safran Foer

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And So It Was

Jonathan Safran Foer

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And So It Was When Anyone Tried To Speak: Their Minds Would Become Tangled In Remembrance. Words Became Floods Of Thought With No Beginning Or End, And Would Drown The Speaker Before He Could Reach The Life Raft Of The Point He Was Trying To Make. It Was Impossible To Remember What One Meant, What, After All Of The Words, Was Intended.

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I Could Not Believe In A God That Would Challenge Faith Like This.

His Voice Was Handsome And Broken, Like A Cobblestone Street.

Cobblestone Streets

We Shared The Smile Of Recognizing Ourselves In Each Other.

Every Night Before Putting Her To Sleep, Yankel Counts Her Ribs, As If One Might Have Disappeared In The Course Of The Day And Become The Seed And Soil For Some New Companion To Steal Her Away From Him.

I Don't Mind If Smiles Come At My Expense, I'm A Small Price To Pay.

People Hurt Each Other. That's What People Do.

The End Of The World Has Come Often, And Continues To Come.

End Of The World

Grandfather Informs Me That Is Not Possible.

She Wanted Nothing More Than Someone To Miss, To Touch, With Whom To Speak Like A Child, With Whom To Be A Child.

But I Still Couldn't Figure Out What It All Meant. The More I Found Out, The Less I Understood.

She Wants To Know If I Love Her, That's All Anyone Wants From Anyone Else, Not Love Itself But The Knowledge That Love Is There, Like New Batteries In The Flashlight In The Emergency Kit In The Hall Closet.

How Did Her Life Live Itself Without Her.

Why Are Entire Flocks Of Industrial Birds Dying At Once? And What About The People Eating Those Birds? Just The Other Day, One Of The Local Pediatricians Was Telling Me He's Seeing All Kinds Of Illnesses That He Never Used To See. Not Only Juvenile Diabetes, But Inflammatory And Autoimmune Diseases That A Lot Of The Docs Don't Even Know What To Call. And Girls Are Going Through Puberty Much Earlier; And Kids Are Allergic To Just About Everything, And Asthma Is Out Of Control. Everyone Knows It's Our Foods... Kids Today Are The First Generation To Grow Up On This Stuff.

My Boots Were So Heavy That I Was Glad There Was A Column Beneath Us. How Could Such A Lonely Person Have Been Living So Close To Me My Whole Life? If I Had Known, I Would Have Gone Up To Keep Him Company.

I Have Made My Own Choice, Which Is Vegetarianism, But It's Not The Choice I'm Imposing On Anybody Else.

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 Am Not Sad, He Would Repeat To Himself Over And Over, I Am Not Sad. As If He Might One Day Convince Himself. Or Fool Himself. Or Convince Others -- The Only Thing Worse Than Being Sad Is For Others To Know That You Are Sad.

It's The Tragedy Of Loving, You Can't Love Anything More Than Something You Miss.

The Un Special Envoy On Food Called It A 'crime Against Humanity' To Funnel 100 Million Tons Of Grain And Corn To Ethanol When Almost A Billion People Are Starving. So What Kind Of Crime Is Animal Agriculture, Which Uses 756 Million Tons Of Grain And Corn Per Year, Much More Than Enough To Adequately Feed The 1.4 Billion Human Who Are Living In Dire Poverty?

I Knew That Our Time Together Was Almost Over, I Asked Her If She Liked Sports, She Asked Me If I Liked Chess, I Asked Her If She Liked Fallen Trees, She Went Home With Her Father, The Center Of Me Followed Her, But I Was Left With The Shell Of Me, I Needed To See Her Again, I Couldn't Explain My Need To Myself, And That's Why It Was Such A Beautiful Need, There's Nothing Wrong With Not Understanding Yourself.

Sometimes I Can Hear My Bones Straining Under The Weight Of All The Lives I'm Not Living.

The Only Way To Overcome Sadness Is To Consume It.

I Thought About All Of The Things That Everyone Ever Says To Each Other, And How Everyone Is Going To Die, Whether It's In A Millisecond, Or Days, Or Months, Or 76.5 Years, If You Were Just Born. 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.

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.

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.

You Can Make Great Meals Without Meat That Are, Of Course, Much More Healthy For The Same Price, But It Takes A Process Of Reeducation, Just Because Americans Aren't Familiar With How To Cook Vegetables Anymore.

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.

My Dream Went All The Way Back To The Beginning. The Rain Rose Into The Clouds, And The Animals Descended The Ramp.

And I Wouldn't Say No To Something Sweet.

Something Sweet

The Disgraced Usurer Yankel D Took The Baby Girl Home That Evening... He Made A Bed Of Crumpled Newspaper In A Deep Baking Pan And Gently Tucked It In The Oven, So That She Wouldn't Be Disturbed By The Noise Of The Small Falls Outside... When He Pulled Her Out To Feed Her Or Just Hold Her, Her Body Was Tattooed With The Newsprint... Sometimes He Would Rock Her To Sleep In His Arms, And Read Her Left To Right, And Know Everything He Needed To Know About The World. If It Wasn't Written On Her, It Wasn't Important To Him.

We've Made Science Experiments Of Ourselves And Our Children.

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.

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 Are Not Long-term Beings. Not Heroes Of Romances In Many Volumes. For One Gesture, For One Word Alone, We Shall Make The Effort. We Openly Admit: Our Creations Will Be Temporary. We Shall Have This As Our Aim: A Gesture.

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?

I Took The World Into Me, Rearranged It, And Sent It Back Out As A Question: "do You Like Me?

I Wanted To Touch Him, To Tell Him That Even If Everyone Left Everyone, I Would Never Leave Him, He Talked And Talked, His Words Fell Through Him, Trying To Find The Floor To His Sadness.

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.

Try To Live So That You Can Always Tell The Truth.

Telling The Truth

Perhaps In The Back Of Our Minds We Already Understand, Without All The Science I've Discussed, That Something Terribly Wrong Is Happening. Our Sustenance Now Comes From Misery. We Know That If Someone Offers To Show Us A Film On How Our Meat Is Produced, It Will Be A Horror Film. 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.

The Paper, The Stapler, The Staples, The Tape. It Makes Me Sick. Physical Things. Forty Years Of Loving Someone Becomes Staples And Tape.

What Is Suffering? I'm Not Sure What It Is, But I Know That Suffering Is The Name We Give To The Origin Of All The Sighs, Screams, And Groans — Small And Large, Crude And Multifaceted — That Concern Us. The Word Defines Our Gaze Even More Than What We Are Looking At.

We Believed In Our Grandmother’s Cooking More Fervently Than We Believed In God.

There's A Really Wonderful Book Called "man Is Not Alone" By Abraham Joshua Heschel, Which Makes The Case That Everybody Is Religious. You Know, We've Just Been Sort Of Too Vigilant About Our Terminology And Our Definitions And Too Precious About It. But There's Nobody Who Is Indifferent To The Experience Of Standing In Front Of An Ocean At Night. There's Nobody Who Is Indifferent To The Feeling Of, You Know, Lying On Your Back And Looking Up At The Night Sky.

I Would Have Done Anything For Him. Maybe That Was My Sickness.

The Animals Are Those Things That God Likes But Doesn't Love.

A Map Such As That One Is Worth Many Hundreds, And As Luck Will Have It, Thousands Of Dollars. But More Than This, It Is A Remembrance Of That Time Before Our Planet Was So Small. When This Map Was Made, I Thought, You Could Live Without Knowing Where You Were Not Living.

Family Are The People Who Must Make You Feel Ashamed When You Are Deserving Of Shame.

So Many Visitors Came To Rub And Kiss Different Parts Of Him For The Fulfillment Of Their Various Wishes That His Entire Body Had To Be Rebronzed Every Month. He Was A Changing God, Destroyed And Recreated By His Believers, Destroyed And Recreated By Their Belief... Those Who Prayed Came To Believe Less And Less In The God Of Their Creation And More And More In Their Belief.

Because It Was Starting To Get Dark, And Because The Streets Were Crowded, I Bumped Into A Googolplex People. Who Were They? Where Were They Going? What Were They Looking For? I Wanted To Hear Their Heartbeats, And I Wanted Them To Hear Mine.

If We Communicated With Something Like Music, We Would Never Be Misunderstood, Because There Is Nothing In Music To Understand...... But Until We Find This New Way Of Speaking, Until We Can Find A Nonapproximate Vocabulary, Nonsense Words Are The Best Thing We've Got. Ifactifice Is One Such Word.

It Was Not The Feeling Of Completeness I So Needed, But The Feeling Of Not Being Empty.

Sadness Of Not Knowing Enough Words To [express What You Mean].

Oh,' She Said. 'i Have Never Seen A Jew Before. Can I See His Horns?

That’s All Anyone Wants From Anyone Else, Not Love Itself But The Knowledge That Love Is There.

Parents Are Always More Knowledgeable Than Their Children, And Children Are Always Smarter Than Their Parents.

It Would Be Possible, In Theory, For Life And Art To Be Reversed.

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.

Second Amendment

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.

There Are More Obese People In The World Than Starving People. As China And India Start To Develop Our Eating Habits - And Not By Accident But Because Agribusiness Is Going Over There And Imposing Our Habits On Them - If The Population Doesn't Increase At All, We'll Have To Raise Twice As Many Animals As We Do.

Highs And Lows Make You Feel That Things Matter, But They're Nothing." "so What's Something?" "being Reliable Is Something. Being Good.

In The End, Everyone Loses Everyone. There Was No Invention To Get Around That.

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.

In Truth I Was Manufacturing A Brick Wall Of Shits.

The Images Of His Infinite Pasts And Infinite Futures Washed Over Him As He Waited, Paralyzed, In The Present.

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.

Suddenly Yankel Was Overcome With A Fear Of Dying, Stronger Than He Felt When His Parents Passed Of Natural Causes, Stronger Than When His Only Brother Was Killed In The Flour Mill Or When His Children Died, Stronger Even Than When He Was A Child And It First Occurred To Him That He Must Try To Understand What It Could Mean Not To Be Alive -- To Be Not In Darkness, Not In Unfeeling -- To Be Not Being, Not To Be.

Darling, You Asked Me To Write You A Letter, So I Am Writing You A Letter. I Do Not Know Why I Am Writing You This Letter, Or What This Letter Is Supposed To Be About, But I Am Writing It Nonetheless, Because I Love You Very Much And Trust That You Have Some Good Purpose For Having Me Write This Letter. I Hope That One Day You Will Have The Experience Of Doing Something You Do Not Understand For Someone You Love. Your Father

....worthy Would-be Worlds Of Words, Whorls Of Working Wonder.

It Is My Great Hope That Our Paths, However Long And Winding, Will Cross Again.

Humans Are The Only Animal That Blushes, Laughs, Has Religion, Wages War, And Kisses With Lips. So In A Way, The More You Kiss With Lips, The More Human You Are. And The More You Wage War.

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

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 Realized I Was On A Something Island. 'how Did I Get Here,' I Wondered, Surrounded By Nothing, "and How Can I Get Back?

I Ran Rather Than Walked, Anxious To Lose My Way. All I Wanted Was To Be Unsure.

However Much We Obfuscate Or Ignore It, We Know That The Factory Farm Is Inhumane In The Deepest Sense Of The Word. And We Know That There Is Something That Matters In A Deep Way About The Lives We Create For The Living Beings Most Within Our Power. Our Response To The Factory Farm Is Ultimately A Test Of How We Respond To The Powerless, To The Most Distant, To The Voiceless--it Is A Test Of How We Act When No One Is Forcing Us To Act One Way Or Another.

I Can't Count The Times That Upon Telling Someone I Am Vegetarian, He Or She Responded By Pointing Out An Inconsistency In My Lifestyle Or Trying To Find A Flaw In An Argument I Never Made. (i Have Often Felt That My Vegetarianism Matters More To Such People Than It Does To Me.)

I Spent My Life Learning To Feel Less.

Everything Is Illuminated

Shyness Is When You Turn Your Head Away From Something You Want.

He Removed Several Pages Of Death Certificates, Which Were Picked Up By Another Breeze And Sent Into The Trees. Some Would Fall With The Leaves That September. Some Would Fall With The Trees Generations Later.

I Felt It Very Moving To Feel His Touch, And To Remember That Hands Can Also Show Love.

I Think It's Very Pretty. Can It Be Pretty If No One Thinks It's Pretty? I Think It's Pretty. If You're The Only One? That's Pretty Pretty. And What About The Boys? Don't You Want Them To Think You're Pretty? I Wouldn't Want A Boy To Think I Was Pretty Unless He Was The Kind Of Boy Who Thought I Was Pretty.

Everything Is The Way It Is Because Everything Was The Way It Was

[…] 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.

As A Writer, Putting Words On The Page Is How I Pay Attention.

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.

We Had Everything To Say To Each Other, But No Ways To Say It

I Try Not To Remember The Life That I Didn’t Want To Lose But Lost And Have To Remember

Just How Destructive Does A Culinary Preference Have To Be Before We Decide To Eat Something Else? If Contributing To The Suffering Of Billions Of Animals That Live Miserable Lives And (quite Often) Die In Horrific Ways Isn't Motivating, What Would Be? If Being The Number One Contributor To The Most Serious Threat Facing The Planet (global Warming) Isn't Enough, What Is? And If You Are Tempted To Put Off These Questions Of Conscience, To Say Not Now, Then When?

I Put My Hand On Him. Touching Him Has Always Been Important To Me, It Was Something I Lived For. I Never Could Explain Why. Little, Nothing Touches, My Fingers Against His Shoulder, The Outsides Of Our Thighs Touching As We Squeeled Together On The Bus. I Couldnt Explain It, But I Needed It. Sometimes I Imagined Stiching All Of Our Little Touches Together. How Many Hundreds Of Thousands Of Fingers Brushing Against Each Other Does It Take To Make Love?

I Am Not A Bad Person. I Am A Good Person Who Has Lived In A Bad Time." Alex's Grandfather..everything Is Illuminated

When It Comes To Meat, Change Is Almost Always Cast As An Absolute. You Are A Vegetarian Or You Are Not.

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.

I Hated Myself For Going, Why Couldn't I Be The Kind Of Person Who Stays?

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?

I Wish My Days Could Be Washed Away Like The Chalk Lines Of My Days.

I Wasn’t Having Second Thoughts, But I Was Having Thoughts.

Second Thoughts

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.

Writing's Funny, It's Like Walking Down A Hall In The Dark Looking For The Light Switch, And Suddenly You Find It, Flip It On, And Then You Discover The Hallway You Passed Through Is Papered With The Novel You've Written.

We Tried So Hard. We Were Always Trying To Help Each Other. But Not Because We Were Helpless. He Needed To Get Things For Me, Just As I Needed To Get Things For Him. It Gave Us Purpose. Sometimes I Would Ask Him For Something That I Did Not Even Want, Just To Let Him Get It For Me. We Spent Our Days Trying To Help Each Other Help Each Other. I Would Get His Slippers. He Would Make My Tea. I Would Turn Up The Heat So He Could Turn Up The Air Conditioner So I Could Turn Up The Heat.

Weeks Passed Like Boats Waiting To Sail Into The Starless Dawn, We Were Full Of Aimless Endless Darkness.

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.

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.

I'm So Afraid Of Losing Something I Love That I Refuse To Love Anything

[grandfather] Would Manufacture Funnies With Grandmother Before She Died About How He Was In Love With Other Women Who Were Not Her. She Knew It Was Only Funnies Because She Would Laugh In Volumes. 'anna,' He Would Say, 'i Am Going To Marry That One With The Pink Hat.' And She Would Say, 'to Whom Are You Going To Marry Her?' And He Would Say, 'to Me.' I Would Laugh Very Much In The Back Seat, And She Would Say To Him, 'but You Are No Priest.' And He Would Say, 'i Am Today.' And She Would Say, 'today You Believe In God?' And He Would Say, 'today I Believe In Love.

I Want An Infinitely Blank Book And The Rest Of Time.

I'm Grateful For Anything That Reminds Me Of What's Possible In This Life. Books Can Do That. Films Can Do That. Music Can Do That. School Can Do That. It's So Easy To Allow One Day To Simply Follow Into The Next, But Every Once In A While We Encounter Something That Shows Us That Anything Is Possible, That Dramatic Change Is Possible, That Something New Can Be Made, That Laughter Can Be Shared.

Can’t You Even Tell Me If I’m On The Right Track?" Buckminster Purred, And Dad Shrugged His Shoulders Again. "but If You Don’t Tell Me Anything, How Can I Ever Be Right?" He Circled Something In An Article And Said, "another Way Of Looking At It Would Be, How Could You Ever Be Wrong?

Every Widow Wakes One Morning, Perhaps After Years Of Pure And Unwavering Grieving, To Realize She Slept A Good Night's Sleep, And Will Be Able To Eat Breakfast, And Doesn't Hear Her Husband's Ghost All The Time, But Only Some Of The Time. Her Grief Is Replaced With A Useful Sadness. Every Parent Who Loses A Child Finds A Way To Laugh Again. The Timbre Begins To Fade. The Edge Dulls. The Hurt Lessens. Every Love Is Carved From Loss. Mine Was. Yours Is. Your Great-great-great-grandchildren's Will Be. But We Learn To Live In That Love.

Language Is Never Fully Trustworthy, But When It Comes To Eating Animals, Words Are As Often Used To Misdirect And Camouflage As They Are To Communicate. Some Words, Like Veal, Help Us Forget What We Are Actually Talking About. Some, Like Free-range, Can Mislead Those Whose Consciences Seek Clarification. Some, Like Happy, Mean The Opposite Of What They Would Seem. And Some, Like Natural, Mean Next To Nothing.

I Could Tell That Mom Was Dreaming, But I Didn't Want To Know What She Was Dreaming About, Because I Had Enough Of My Own Nightmares, And If She Had Been Dreaming Something Happy, I Would Have Been Angry At Her For Dreaming Something Happy.

I Wanted To Tell Her Everything, Maybe If I'd Been Able To, We Could Have Lived Differently, Maybe I'd Be There With You Now Instead Of Here. Maybe... If I'd Said, 'i'm So Afraid Of Losing Something I Love That I Refuse To Love Anything,' Maybe That Would Have Made The Impossible Possible. Maybe, But I Couldn't Do It, I Had Buried Too Much Too Deeply Inside Me. And Here I Am, Instead Of There.

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?

I Need An Office, So I Can Have A Place Where I Don't Write.

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.

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.

Cruelty Depends On An Understanding Of Cruelty, And The Ability To Choose Against It. Or To Choose To Ignore It.

People Around The World Were Moving From One Place To Another. No One Was Staying.

The Philosopher Elaine Scarry Has Observed That "beauty Always Takes Place In The Particular." Cruelty, On The Other Hand, Prefers Abstraction.

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!

My Point Is That There Are A Lot Of Forces, Like The Media And The General Political Rhetoric Tells Us We Should Have More. That We Should Do Better Than Our Parents And Have A Bigger House Or A Better Car.

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?

The Sky Slowly Pulled Up Its Blue Dress To Reveal Night.

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?

Everyone Performs Bad Actions... A Bad Person Is Someone Who Does Not Lament His Bad Actions.

I'm Deeply Curious About Jewish Things. I've Toyed Around With The Idea Of Going To Rabbinical School.

People Shouldn't Be Allowed To Get Married Until It's Too Late To Have Kids.

I Started Carrying Blank Books Like This One Around, Which I Would Fill With All The Things I Couldn't Say.

I Was More Alone Than If I Had Been Alone.

Your Dad Didn't Die, So I Won't Be Able To Explain It To You.

Few People Sufficiently Appreciate The Colossal Task Of Feeding A World Of Billions Of Omnivores Who Demand Meat With Their Potatoes.

Why Didn't He Say Goodbye? I Gave Myself A Bruise. Why Didn't He Say 'i Love You'?

What? She Said Once To Herself, And Then Once Aloud, What? She Felt A Total Displacement, Like A Spinning Globe Brought To A Sudden Halt By The Light Touch Of A Finger. How Did She End Up Here, Like This? How Could There Have Been So Much - So Many Moments, So Many People And Things, So Many Razors And Pillows, Timepieces And Subtle Coffins - Without Her Being Aware? How Did Her Life Live Itself Without Her?

I Would Have Done Anything For Him. Maybe That Was My Sickness. We Made Love In Nothing Places And Turned The Lights Off. It Felt Like Crying. We Could Not Look At Each Other. It Always Had To Be From Behind. Like That First Time. And I Knew He Wasn't Thinking Of Me. He Squeezed My Sides So Hard, And Pushed So Hard. Like He Was Trying To Push Me Through To Somewhere Else. Why Does Anyone Ever Make Love?

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.

Nothing Is Beautiful And True.

Sadness Of Love Without Release.

We Cracked Up Together, Which Was Necessary, Because She Loved Me Again.

They Reciprocated The Great And Saving Lie--that Our Love For Things Is Greater Than Our Lover For Our Love For Things--willfully Playing The Parts They Wrote For Themselves, Willfully Creating And Believing Fictions Necessary For Life.

It Can Be Challenge Enough To Have To Eat With Myself.

For How Long Could We Fail Until We Surrendered?

I Didn't Intend To Write About Totems Or People Searching. I Tried Not To Constrain Myself, And This Is What I Ended Up With. There's This Great Auden Quote: "i Look At What I Write So I Can See What I Think."

Life Was A Small Negative Space Cut Out Of The Eternal Solidity, And For The First Time, It Felt Precious - Not Like All Of The Words That Had Come To Mean Nothing, But Like The Last Breath Of A Drowning Victim.

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?

If It Had And Answer, It Wouldn't Really Be Love, Would It?

Food Is Not Rational. Food Is Culture, Habit, And Identity.

And The Joys I've Felt Have Not Always Been Joyous. I Could Have Lived Differently. When I Was Your Age, My Grandfather Bought Me A Ruby Bracelet. It As Too Big For Me An Would Slide Up And Down My Arm. It Was Almost A Necklace. He Later Told Me That He Had Asked The Jeweler Make That Way. Its Size Was Supposed To Be A Symbol Of His Love. More Rubies, More Love. But I Could Not Wear It Comfortably. I Could Not Wear It At All. So Here Is The Point Of Everything I Have Been Trying To Say. If I Were To Give A Bracelet To You, Now, I Would Measure Your Wrist Twice

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.

(what Are Your Ghosts Like?) (they Are On The Insides Of The Lids Of My Eyes.) (this Is Also Where My Ghosts Reside.) (you Have Ghosts?) (of Course I Have Ghosts.) (but You Are A Child.) (i Am Not A Child.) (but You Have Not Known Love.) (these Are My Ghosts, The Spaces Amid Love.)

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.

I'm A Novelist, I'm Not An Activist. I'm Not A Non-fiction Writer, I'm Not A Journalist. I'm Not A Foodie, I'm Not Even Really An Animal Person, Or An Environmentalist. I Did The Best I Could With This, But It's Not Who I Am.

Sometimes One Simply Wants To Disappear.

Abraham Responds "here I Am" When God Asks Him To Sacrifice His Son, And He Answers "here I Am" When His Son Asks Him About What Is Happening. It's A Paradoxical Moment. He Can't Be Fully Present For His God Or His Son.

If People Thought About Food More Like How We Think About The Environment, A Lot Of People Would Be Eating Differently And The Whole System Would Look A Lot Different.

Jews Have A Special Relationship To Books, And The Haggadah Has Been Translated More Widely, And Reprinted More Often, Than Any Other Jewish Book. It Is Not A Work Of History Or Philosophy, Not A Prayer Book, User’s Manual, Timeline, Poem Or Palimpsest - And Yet It Is All These Things.

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?

If It Weren't My Life, I Wouldn't Have Believed It.

Well, What I Don't Get Is Why Do We Exist? I Don't Mean How, But Why.' I Watched The Fireflies Of His Thoughts Orbit His Head. He Said, 'we Exist Because We Exist. . .we Could Imagine All Sorts Of Universes Like This One, But This Is The One That Happened.

I Used To Think That Humor Was The Only Way To Appreciate How Wonderful And Terrible The World Is, To Celebrate How Big Life Is. But Now I Think The Opposite. Humor Is A Way Of Shrinking From That Wonderful And Terrible World.

She Extended A Hand That I Didn't Know How To Take, So I Broke Its Fingers With My Silence.

Choosing Leaf Or Flesh, Factory Farm Or Family Farm, Does Not In Itself Change The World, But Teaching Ourselves, Our Children, Our Local Communities, And Our Nation To Choose Conscience Over Ease Can.

If We Are Not Given The Option To Live Without Violence, We Are Given The Choice To Center Our Meals Around Harvest Or Slaughter, Husbandry Or War. We Have Chosen Slaughter. We Have Chosen War. That's The Truest Version Of Our Story Of Eating Animals. Can We Tell A New Story?

I Want To Talk About God In A Literary Way. But I Think I Would Have A Very Hard Time Praying To God.

She Laughed Enough To Migrate An Entire Flock Of Birds. That Was How She Said Yes

Sometimes People Who Seem Good End Up Being Not As Good As You Might Have Hoped, You Know?

He Was Not Such A Special Person. He Loved To Read Very Much, And Also To Write. He Was A Poet, And He Exhibited Me Many Of His Poems. I Remember Many Of Them. They Were Silly, You Could Say, And About Love. He Was Always In His Room Writing Those Things, And Never With People. I Used To Tell Him, What Good Is All That Love Doing On Paper? I Said, Let Love Write On You For A Little. But He Was So Stubborn. Or Perhaps He Was Only Timid.

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.

The Question, I've Come To Think, Is Not What Inspires One To Change, But What Inspires One To Remain Changed.

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.

I Can Only Hold On To The Things I Want To Lose.

I Have So Much To Say To You. I Want To Begin At The Beginning, Because That Is What You Deserve. I Want To Tell You Everything, Without Leaving Out A Single Detail. But Where Is The Beginning? And What Is Everything?

What You Deserve

Technology Celebrates Connectedness, But Encourages Retreat.

The Secret Was A Hole In The Middle Of Me That Every Happy Thing Fell Into.

The Factory Farm Has Succeeded By Divorcing People From Their Food, Eliminating Farmers, And Ruling Agriculture By Corporate Fiat.

The Only Thing More Painful Than Being An Active Forgetter Is To Be An Inert Rememberer.

And Nothing Inspires As Much Shame As Being A Parent. Children Confront Us With Our Paradoxes And Hypocrisies, And We Are Exposed. You Need To Find An Answer For Every Why — Why Do We Do This? Why Don’t We Do That? — And Often There Isn’t A Good One. So You Say, Simply, Because. Or You Tell A Story That You Know Isn’t True. And Whether Or Not Your Face Reddens, You Blush. The Shame Of Parenthood — Which Is A Good Shame — Is That We Want Our Children To Be More Whole Than We Are, To Have Satisfactory Answers.

You Can See The Most Beautiful Things From The Observation Deck Of The Empire State Building. I Read Somewhere That People On The Street Are Supposed To Look Like Ants, But That's Not True. They Look Like Little People. And The Cars Look Like Little Cars. And Even The Buildings Look Little. It's Like New York Is A Miniature Replica Of New York, Which Is Nice, Because You Can See What It's Really Like, Instead Of How It Feels When You're In The Middle Of It.

So She Had To Satisfy Herself With The Idea Of Love - Loving The Loving Of Things Whose Existence She Didn't Care At All About. Love Itself Became The Object Of Her Love. She Loved Herself In Love, She Loved Loving Love, As Love Loves Loving, And Was Able, In That Way, To Reconcile Herself With A World That Fell So Short Of What She Would Have Hoped For. It Was Not The World That Was The Great And Saving Lie, But Her Willingness To Make It Beautiful And Fair, To Live A Once-removed Life, In A World Once-removed From The One In Which Everyone Else Seemed To Exist.

She Was A Genius Of Sadness, Immersing Herself In It, Separating Its Numerous Strands, Appreciating Its Subtle Nuances. She Was A Prism Through Which Sadness Could Be Divided Into Its Infinite Spectrum.

She Brushed Her Eyelashes Against His Chest.

We Slept In The Same Bed. There Was Never A Right Time To Say It. It Was Always Unnecessary. The Books In My Father's Shed Were Sighing. The Sheets Were Rising And Falling Around Me With Anna's Breathing. I Thought About Waking Her. But It Was Unnecessary. There Would Be Other Nights. And How Can You Say I Love You To Someone You Love? I Rolled Onto My Side And Fell Asleep Next To Her. Here Is The Point Of Everything I Have Been Trying To Tell You... It's Always Necessary. I Love You.

Only A Few Months Into Our Marriage," Writes The Grandfather, "we Started Marking Off Areas In The Apartment As 'nothing Places,' In Which One Could Be Assured Of Complete Privacy, We Agreed That We Never Would Look At The Marked-off Zones, That They Would Be Nonexistent Territories In The Apartment In Which One Could Temporarily Cease To Exist.

Ninety-eight Percent Of All The Soy That's Raised Goes To Livestock. So People Make Fun Of Vegetarians For Being Tofu Eaters, But No One Eats Tofu Like Steak Eaters, By A Long Shot. It's Also Funny That Tofu Is Held Up As What A Vegetarian Eats. I Mean Maybe I Eat Tofu Once A Month, But Other Than That, Never. All Of It, Statistically Speaking, Is Going To Livestock.

[she] Always Knew He Was A Fiction But Believed In Him Anyway.

What The Meat Industry Figured Out Is That You Don't Need Healthy Animals To Make A Profit. Sick Animals Are More Profitable... Factory Farms Calculate How Close To Death They Can Keep Animals Without Killing Them. That's The Business Model. How Quickly They Can Be Made To Grow, How Tightly They Can Be Packed, How Much Or How Little Can They Eat, How Sick They Can Get Without Dying...we Live In A World In Which It's Conventional To Treat An Animal Like A Block Of Wood.

Was His Death An Essential Stage In The Continuation Of His Life?

I Wanted To Hit Him. I Wanted To Hold Him. I Wanted To Shout Myself Into His Ear.

Just Because You're An Atheist, That Doesn't Mean You Wouldn't Love For Things To Have Reasons For Why They Are.

Why Do Beautiful Songs Make You Sad?' 'because They Aren't True.' 'never?' 'nothing Is Beautiful And True.

Is That Growing Old? Or Is It Something Worse?

It Shouldn't Be The Consumer's Responsibility To Figure Out What's Cruel And What's Kind, What's Environmentally Destructive And What's Sustainable. Cruel And Destructive Food Products Should Be Illegal. We Don't Need The Option Of Buying Children's Toys Made With Lead Paint, Or Aerosols With Chlorofluorocarbons, Or Medicines With Unlabeled Side Effects. And We Don't Need The Option Of Buying Factory-farmed Animals.

It Broke My Heart Into More Pieces Than My Heart Was Made Of, Why Can't People Say What They Mean At The Time?

Cruelty...prefers Abstraction. Some Have Tried To Resolved This Gap By Hunting Or Butchering An Animal Themselves, As If Those Experiences Might Somehow Legitimize The Endeavor Of Eating Animals. This Is Very Silly. Murdering Someone Would Surely Prove That You Are Capable Of Killing, But It Woudln't Be The Most Reasonable Way To Understand Why You Should Or Shouldn't Do It.

Everything Is To Protect You. I Exist In Case You Need To Be Protected.

Fiction Works When It Makes A Reader Feel Something Strongly.

Maybe I'll Try To Be More Patient With Morons.

It Is Not A Thing That You Can Imagine. It Only Is. After That, There Can Be No Imagining.

I Wasn’t Trying To Invent Better And Better Homes, But To Show Her That Homes Didn’t Matter, We Could Live In Any Home, In Any City, In Any Country, In Any Century, And Be Happy, As If The World Were Just What We Lived In.

Everything Is The Way It Is Because Everything Was The Way It Was. Sometimes I Feel Ensnared In This, As If No Matter What I Do, What Will Come Has Already Been Fixed.

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.

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Terry Pratchett

Portia Simpson-Miller

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