…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.

This is the sixty-nine,” I told him, presenting the magazine in front of him. I put my fingers — two of them — on the action, so that he would not overlook it. “Why is...

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

Humans are the only animals that have children on purpose, keep in touch (or don’t), care about birthdays, waste and lose time, brush their teeth, feel nostalgia, scrub stains, have religions and political parties and...

She let out a laugh, and then she put her hand over her mouth, like she was angry at herself for forgetting her sadness.

But it’s turtles all the way down!”I love that story, because it shows how ignorant people can be. And also because I love tortoises.

I could not believe in a God that would challenge faith like this.

A few days after we came home from the hospital, I sent a letter to a friend, including a photo of my son and some first impressions of fatherhood. He responded, simply, ‘Everything is possible...

I thought maybe if she could express herself rather than suffer herself, if she had a way to relieve the burden, she lived for nothing more than living, with nothing to get inspired by, to...

[…]It is as if after surviving so much, there was no longer reason to survive.

When we lift our forks, we hang our hats somewhere. We set ourselves in one relationship or another to farmed animals, farm-workers, national economies, and global markets. Not making a decision–eating ‘like everyone else’–is to...

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.

unkindness �of ravens”?

There are more places you haven’t heard of then you’re heard of!’ I loved that

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 hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love.

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 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...

I think and think and think, I‘ve thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.

From space, astronauts can see people making love as a tiny speck of light. Not light, exactly, but a glow that could be mistaken for light–a coital radiance that takes generations to pour like honey...

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. A calender that showed the wrong month....

Whether we change our lives or do nothing, we have responded. To do nothing is to do something.

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?

Grandfather informs me that is not possible.

(You do not have to be shamed in my closeness. Family are the people who must never make you feel ashamed.)(You are wrong. Family are the people who must make you feel ashamed when you...

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,...