Human beings 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.

I can forgive you for leaving, but not for coming back.

To feel alone is to be alone.

What’s so horrible about being dead forever, and not feeling anything, and not even dreaming? What’s so great about feeling and dreaming?

There’s nothing wrong with not understanding yourself.

War! We go on killing each other to no purpose! It is war waged by humanity against humanity, and it will only end when there’s no one left to fight.

Memory was supposed to fill the time, but it made time a hole to be filled.

Being reliable is something. Being good.

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....

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.

…is ignorance bliss, I don’t know, but it’s so painful to think, and tell me, what did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever bring me? I think and think...

I know a lot about birds and bees, but I don’t know very much about the birds and the bees. Everything I do know I had to teach myself on the Internet, because I don’t...

She took the posters downtown that afternoon. She filled a rolling suitcase with them … she took a stapler. And a box of staples. And hope. I think of those things. The paper, the stapler,...

Needless to say, jamming deformed, drugged, overstressed birds together in a filthy, waste-coated room is not very healthy. Beyond deformities, eye damage, blindness, bacterial infections of bones, slipped vertebrae, paralysis, internal bleeding, anemia, slipped tendons,...

People around the world were moving from one place to another. No one was staying.

I will describe my eyes and then begin the story. My eyes are blue and resplendent. Now I will begin the story.

Still.” Anyway, the fascinating thing was that I read in National Geographic that there are more people alive now than have died in all of human history. In other words, if everyone wanted to play...

In other words, if everyone wants to play Hamlet all at once, they couldn’t because there aren’t enough skulls.

We are breeding creatures incapable of surviving in any place other than the most artificial settings. We have focused the awesome power of modern genetic knowledge to bring into being animals that suffer more.

Are you an optimist or a pessimist?” “I can’t remember. Which?” “Do you know what those words mean?” “Not really.” “An optimist is positive and hopeful. A pessimist is negative and cynical.” “I’m an optimist.”...

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...

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.

My dream went all the way back to the beginning. The rain rose into the clouds, and the animals descended the ramp.

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...

Scientific studies and government records suggest that virtually all (upwards of 95 percent of) chickens become infected with E. coli (an indicator of fecal contamination) and between 39 and 75 percent of chickens in retail...

Does it break my heart, of course, every moment of every day, into more pieces than my heart was made of…

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...

You can not protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.

I have tutored Little Igor to be a man of this world. For example, I exhibited him a smutty magazine three days yore, so that he should be appraised of the many positions in which...

Elsewhere the paper notes that vegetarians and vegans (including athletes) ‘meet and exceed requirements’ for protein. And, to render the whole we-should-worry-about-getting-enough-protein-and-therefore-eat-meat idea even more useless, other data suggests that excess animal protein intake is...

This brings me back to the image of Kafka standing before a fish in the Berlin aquarium, a fish on which his gaze fell in a newly found peace after he decided not to eat...

She was not cryingWhich surprised me very muchBut I understand nowThat she had found placesFor her melancholyThat were behind more masksThan only her eyes

Ce n’étais pas moi!”What about little microphones? What if everyone swallowed them, and they played the sounds of our hearts through little speakers, which could be in the pouches of our overalls? When you skateboard...

With writing, we have second chances.

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...

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...

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...

Young friends, whose string-and-tin-can phone extended from island to island, had to pay out more and more string, as if letting kites go higher and higher. They had more and more to tell each other,...

The mistakes I’ve made are dead to me. But I can’t take back the things I never did.

For Nicole, my idea of beauty

Memories are small prayers to God, if we believed in that sort of thing.

It is best if the guard is in love with America and wants to overawe the American by being a premium guard. This kind of guard thinks that he will encounter the American again one...

All that mattered was him looking at me

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.

It’s true, I am afraid of dying. I am afraid of the world moving forward without me, of my absence going unnoticed, or worse, being some natural force propelling life on. Is it selfish? Am...

And this is what living next to a waterfall is like, Safran. Every widow wakes one morning, perhaps after years of pure and unwavering grieving, to realize she slept a good night’s sleep, and will...

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.

The animals are those things that God likes but doesn’t love.

Canary light of oil lamps

Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.