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.

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...

Mother is a humble woman. Very, very humble. She toils at a small café one hour distance from our home. She presents food and drink to customers there, and says to me, “I mount the...

Before you rush off trying to see everything you can, educate yourself.

I once went to report on a village in Russia, a community of artists who were forced to flee the cities! I’d heard that paintings hung everywhere! I heard you couldn’t see the walls through...

I brought the birdcages to the windows.I opened the windows, and opened the birdcages.I poured the fish down the drain.I took the dogs and cats downstairs and removed their collars.I released the insects onto the...

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...

Parents are always more knowledgeable than their children, and children are always smarter than their parents.

The next morning I told Mom I couldn’t go to school again, She asked what was wrong. I told her, “The same thing that’s always wrong.” “You’re sick?” “I’m sad.” “About Dad?” “About everything..” She...

Fuck You!’ [Oskar said] ‘Exuse me!’ [His mom said] ‘Sorry. I mean, screw you.’ ‘You need a time-out!’ ‘I need a mausoleum!

…people with nothing to declare carry the most.

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,...

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...

There are worse things, worse than being like us. Look, at least we’re alive.

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...

When she woke up crying for one of her nightmares, the Kolker would stay with her, brush her hair with his hands, collect her tears in thimbles for her to drink the next morning (The...

…only someone who’d never been an animal would put up a sign saying not to feed them….

One hundred years of joy can be erased in one second

(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...

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...

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,...

Wszyscy przeczuwamy niebezpieczeństwo. Nasze jedzenie powstaje kosztem ogromnego cierpienia.Gdy ktoś proponuje nam obejrzenie filmu o produkcji mięsa, spodziewamy się horroru. Możliwe, że wiemy więcej, niż nam się wydaje. Wolimy jednak odsuwać od siebie tę świadomość....

He looked so much like me, I could tell that he saw it, too, we shared the smile of recognizing ourselves in each other, how many imposters do I have? DO we all make the...

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...

I don’t think that there are any limits to how excellent we could make life seem.

Why do beautiful songs make you sad?’ ‘Because they aren’t true.’ ‘Never?’ ‘Nothing is beautiful and true.

Today, it isn’t unusual for meat to travel almost halfway around the globe to reach your supermarket. The average distance our meat travels hovers arounf fifteen hundred miles.

She wanted more, more slang, more figures of speech, the bee’s knees, the cats pajamas, horse of a different color, dog-tired, she wanted to talk like she was born here, like she never came from...

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 dream thatwe are our fathers. I walked to the Brod,41without knowing why, and looked intomy reflection in the water. I couldn’t lookaway. What was the image that pulled mein after it? What was it...

In bed that night I invented a special drain that would be underneath every pillow in New York, and would connect to the reservoir. Whenever people cried themselves to sleep, the tears would all go...

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?

He spent the next weeks blocking scenes of the bureaucrat fucking his wife. On the floor with cooking ingredients. Standing, with socks still on. In the grass of the yard of their new and immense...

She was a prism through which sadness could be divided into its infinite spectrum.

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 hated the gnawing longing that accompanied having everything.

Succotash my cocker spaniel, you fudging crevasse-hole dipshiitake!

I kept thinking how they were all names of dead people, and how names are basically the only thing dead people keep.

…Food serves two parallel purposes: it nourishes and it helps you remember. Eating and storytelling are inseparable—the saltwater is also tears; the honey not only tastes sweet, but makes us think of sweetness; the matzo...

I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live.

In my dream, people apologized for things that were about to happen, and lit candles by inhaling.

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...

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 feel too much. That’s what’s going on.’ ‘Do you think one can feel too much? Or just feel in the wrong ways?’ ‘My insides don’t match up with my outsides.’ ‘Do anyone’s insides and...

As we drove, I imagined we were standing still and the world was coming toward us.

There are only so many times that you can utter ‘It does not hurt’ before it begins to hurt even more than the hurt. You become enlightened of the feeling of feeling hurt, which is...

I like to see people reunited, I like to see people run to each other, I like the kissing and the crying, I like the impatience, the stories that the mouth can’t tell fast enough,...

I like to see people reunited, maybe that’s a silly thing, but what can I say, I like to see people run to each other, I like the kissing and the crying, I like the...

Why are you leaving me?He wrote, I do not know how to live.I do not know either but I am trying.I do not know how to try.There were some things I wanted to tell him....

You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.