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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.

-Jonathan Safran Foer

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He Removed Several Pages

Jonathan Safran Foer

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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.

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It Was Terrible. All Of The Things We Couldn't Share. The Room Was Filled With Conversations We Weren't Having.

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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?

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Just To Be A Functioning Adult In The World, We Develop All Of These Layers Of Protection. When We See Homeless People, We Don't Cry, Even Though Homeless People Probably Deserve Our Tears - You Know, It's A Horrible Thing.

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?

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Or Perhaps A Widow Found Him And Took Him In: Brought Him An Easy Chair, Changed His Sweater Every Morning, Shaved His Face Until The Hair Stopped Growing, Took Him Faithfully To Bed With Her Every Night, Whispered Sweet Nothings Into What Was Left Of His Ear, Laughed With Him Over Black Coffee, Cried With Him Over Yellowing Pictures, Talked Greenly About Having Kids Of Her Own, Began To Miss Him Before She Became Sick, Left Him Everything In Her Will, Thought Of Only Him As She Died, Always Knew He Was Fiction But Believed In Him Anyway.

The More Exposure People Have To The Realities Of Factory Farming, The More We Will See People Rejecting It. It's Already Happening.

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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.

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?

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.

We Laughed And Laughed, Together And Separately, Out Loud And Silently, We Were Determined To Ignore Whatever Needed To Be Ignored, To Build A New World From Nothing If Nothing In Our World Could Be Salvaged, 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.

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?

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Her Life Was A Slow Realization That The World Was Not For Her And That For Whatever Reason She Would Never Be Happy And Honest At The Same Time. She Felt As If She Were Brimming Always Producing And Hoarding More Love Inside Her. But There Was No Release. Table Ivory Elephant Charm Rainbow Onion Hairdo Violence Melodrama Honey...none Of It Moved Her. She Addressed The World Honestly Searching For Something Deserving Of The Volumes Of Love She Knew She Had Within Her But To Each She Would Have To Say I Don't Love You.

She Is Deranged, But So So Playful.

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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.

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What If I Never Stop Inventing?

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Do You Have Any Coffee?'...'it Stunts My Growth, And I'm Afraid Of Death.

Afraid Of Death

As Long As I Am Thinking, I Am Alive.

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.

Look, Taste Is Clearly The Crudest Of Our Senses: This Is Scientifically, Objectively Factual. It Is Less Nuanced. Eyesight Is Extraordinary - Hearing, Touch. I Find People Who Devote Their Whole Lives To Taste A Little Strange.

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.

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How Would You Judge An Artist Who Mutilated Animals In A Gallery Because It Was Visually Arresting? How Riveting Would The Sound Of A Tortured Animal Need To Be To Make You Want To Hear It That Badly? Try To Imagine Any End Other Than Taste For Which It Would Be Justifiable To Do What We Do To Farmed Animals.

We Need A Better Way To Talk About Eating Animals. We Need A Way That Brings Meat To The Center Of Public Discussion In The Same Way It Is Often At The Center Of Our Plates. This Doesn't Require That We Pretend We Are Going To Have A Collective Agreement. However Strong Our Intuitions Are About What's Right For Us Personally And Even About What's Right For Others, We All Know In Advance That Our Positions Will Clash With Those Of Our Neighbors. What Do We Do With That Most Inevitable Reality? Drop The Conversation, Or Find A Way To Reframe It?

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

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

I Love You Also Means I Love You More Than Anyone Loves You, Or Has Loved You, Or Will Love You, And Also, I Love You In A Way That No One Loves You, Or Has Loved You, Or Will Love You, And Also, I Love You In A Way That I Love No One Else, And Never Have Loved Anyone Else, And Never Will Love Anyone Else.

We Looked At Each Other Until It Felt Like Everything Would Burst Into Flames

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.

And She Would Say, "today You Believe In God?" And He Would Say, "today I Believe In Love".

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.

She Maintained A Careful Balance By Her Window, Never Allowing The Men To Come Too Close, Never Allowing Them To Stray Too Far.

Kids Are A Great Analogy. You Want Your Kids To Grow Up, And You Don't Want Your Kids To Grow Up. You Want Your Kids To Become Independent Of You, But It's Also A Parent's Worst Nightmare: That They Won't Need You. It's Like The Real Tragedy Of Parenting.

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.

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'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.

None Of The Ways People Were Talking About September 11 Felt Right To Me. I Don't Buy Into The Way George W. Bush Talks About It. I Don't Buy Into The Way The 9/11 Commission Talks About It. It Isn't That I Don't Believe Them. It's Just That They're Not The Tellings For Me.

Something Having Been Done Just About Everywhere Just About Always Is No Kind Of Justification For Doing It Now.

[...]it Is As If After Surviving So Much, There Was No Longer Reason To Survive.

Our Relationship To The Environment Matters, Our Relationship To Animals Matters, And Our Relationship To Culture Matters.

It’s Hard To Say Goodbye To The Place You’ve Lived. It Can Be As Hard As Saying Goodbye To A Person.

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.

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

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.

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.

Yesterday I Wanted To Turn Inside Out.

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.

It Seems Entirely Possible To Me That Horrible Things Can Be Going On Without Us Becoming Horrible People.

Our Love Was The Affliction For Which Only Our Love Was The Cure.

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

And The General Shot My Sister. I Could Not Look At Her, But I Remember The Sound Of When She Hit The Ground. I Hear That Sound When Things Hit The Ground Still. Anything.' If I Could, I Would Make It So Nothing Ever Hit The Ground Again.

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.

We Shared The Smile Of Recognizing Ourselves In Each Other.

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.

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

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?

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

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.

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

If There Is No Love In The World, We Will Make A New World, And We Will Give It Walls, And We Will Furnish It With Soft Red Interiors, From The Inside Out, And Give It A Knocker That Resonates Like A Diamond Falling To A Jeweller's Felt So That We Should Never Hear It. Love Me, Because Love Doesn't Exist, And I Have Tried Everything That Does.

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.

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!

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.

And I Wouldn't Say No To Something Sweet.

Something Sweet

You Cannot Protect Yourself From Sadness Without Protecting Yourself From Happiness.

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

I Hope You Never Think About Anything As Much As I Think About You.

Sometimes One Simply Wants To Disappear.

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'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.

In The Water I Saw My Father's Face, And That Face Saw The Face Of Its Father, And So On, And So On, Reflecting Backward To The Beginning Of Time, To The Face Of God, In Whose Image We Were Created.

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.

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.

Memory Was Supposed To Fill The Time, But It Made Time A Hole To Be Filled. Each Second Was Two Hundred Yards, To Be Walked, Crawled. You Couldn't See The Next Hour, It Was So Far In The Distance. Tomorrow Was Over The Horizon, And Would Take An Entire Day To Reach.

Chickens Can Do Many Things, But They Cannot Make Sophisticated Deals With Humans.

Words Are Capable Of Making Experience More Vivid, And Also Of Organizing It. They Can Scare Us, And They Can Comfort Us.

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."

Eating A Piece Of Meat, At Its Most Efficient, We Could Say Is Like Throwing Away Six Times That Amount Of Food Every Time You Eat It Because You're Recycling All Those Calories Through It. I Know A Lot Of People Who Came To This Issue Not Through Animal Welfare But Through Wastefulness.

I Hope That One Day You Will Have The Experience Of Doing Something You Do Not Understand For Someone You Love.

Someone You Love

One Of The Things That I Love About Writing Novels Is That It Really Doesn't Matter What Next Step You Take As Long As You're Pursuing Some Intuition Or Instinct. Of Course, Then, Intuitions Or Instincts Don't Make For Great Novels, But They Often Make For Good First Drafts.

Food For Her Is Not Food, It Is Terror, Dignity, Gratitude, Vengeance, Joyfulness, Humiliation, Religion, History, And, Of Course, Love. As If The Fruit She Always Offered Us Were Picked From The Destroyed Brances Of Out Family Tree.

The Only Thing Worse Than Being Sad Is For Others To Know You Are Sad.

Everything Is Illuminated

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

I Can Forgive You For Leaving, But Not For Coming Back.

Is There Really Anyone, Besides Rudy Giuliani, Who Prefers The New Times Square?

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.

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

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.

You Need To Have A Reader's Sympathy In Order To Accomplish Anything. It's Like At A Reading, I Find It's Better To Read Something Funny Than To Read Something Tragic. It Just Goes Over Better Because You Have A Finite Amount Of Time With Somebody. Of Course, In A Book, You Have A Lot Of Time. But You Still Do Want To Make A Certain Impression Right When You Begin.

They Learned To Hate Her Unknowability, Her Untouchability, The Collage Of Her.

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.

I First Became A Vegetarian When I Was Nine, In Response To An Argument Made By A Radical Babysitter. My Great Change - Which Lasted A Couple Of Weeks - Was Based On The Very Simple Instinct That It's Wrong To Kill Animals For Food.

What Kind Of World Would We Create If Three Times A Day We Activated Our Compassion And Reason As We Sat Down To Eat, If We Had The Moral Imagination And The Pragmatic Will To Change Our Most Fundamental Act Of Consumption?

When I Heard Your Organization Was Recording Testimonies, I Knew I Had To Come. She Died In My Arms, Saying 'i Don't Want To Die.' That Is What Death Is Like. It Doesn't Matter What Uniforms The Soldiers Are Wearing. It Doesn't Matter How Good The Weapons Are. I Thought If Everyone Could See What I Saw, We Would Never Have War Anymore.

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.

We Need A Better Way To Talk About Eating Animals, A Way That Doesn't Ignore, Or Even Just Shruggingly Accept Things Like Habits, Cravings, Family And History, But Rather Incorporates Them Into The Conversation. The More They Are Allowed In, The More Strongly We Will Want To Follow Our Best Instincts.

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

Mom Said, "his Spirit Is There," And That Made Me Really Angry. I Told Her, "dad Didn't Have A Spirit! He Had Cells!" "his Memory Is There." "his Memory Is Here," I Said, Pointing At My Head. "dad Had A Spirit," She Said, Like She Was Rewinding A Bit In Our Conversation. I Told Her, "he Had Cells, And Now They're On Rooftops, And In The River, And In The Lungs Of Millions Of People Around New York, Who Breathe Him Every Time They Speak!

It’s Much Easier To Be Cruel Than One Might Think.

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

Brod Discovered 613 Sadnesses, Each Perfectly Unique, Each A Singular Emotion, No More Similar To Any Other Sadness Than To Anger, Ecstasy, Guilt, Or Frustration. Mirror Sadness. Sadness Of Domesticated Birds. Sadness Of Being Sad In Front Of One's Parent. Humor Sadness. Sadness Of Love Without Release.

Memory Was Supposed To Fill The Time, But It Made Time A Hole To Be Filled.

I Can't Even Say 'hair Pie,'' I Told Him, 'unless I'm Talking About An Actual Pie Made Out Of Rabbits.

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.

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.

I Always Write Out Of A Need To Read Something, Rather Than A Need To Write Something.

I Never Confused What I Had With What I Was.

I Made Up My Mind That Nothing,, Nothing Was Going To Stop Me Not Even Me.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Grandfather Informs Me That Is Not Possible.

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