A few weeks after the worst day, I started writing lots of letters. I don’t know why, but it was one of the only things that made my boots lighter.

I’m not smarter than you, I’m more knowledgeable than you, and that’s only because I’m older than you. Parents are always more knowledgeable than their children, and children are always smarter than their parents.

I’ was the last word I was able to speak aloud, which is a terrible thing, but there it is, I would walk around the neighborhood saying, ‘I I I I.’ ‘You want a cup...

She said, “Do you have more things that you need, or more that you don’t need?” I said, “It depends on what it means to need.

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.

If I’d been someone else in a different world I’d’ve done something different, but I was myself and the world was the world, so I was silent.

But I knew the truth and that’s why I was so sad. Every moment before this one depends on this one. Everything in the history of the world can be proven wrong in one moment.

It takes life to live life

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.You never bake bread, he wrote,...

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...

I went to a tattoo parlor and had YES written onto the palm of my left hand, and NO onto my right palm, what can I say, it hasn’t made my life wonderful, its made...

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...

Sometimes people who seem good end up being not as good as you might have hoped, you know?

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...

We know, at least, that this decision (ending factory farming) will help prevent deforestation, curb global warming, reduce pollution, save oil reserves, lessen the burden on rural America, decrease human rights abuses, improve publish health,...

Tomorrow was over the horizon and it would take an entire day to reach

Why didn’t I learn to treat everything like it was the last time. My greatest regret was how much I believed in the future.

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...

Sometimes my hand starts to burn and I am convinced we are writing the same word at the same moment.

It’s much easier to be cruel than one might think.

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?

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...

Because sometimes people who seem goodend up being not as good as you might have hoped.

AND IF WE ARE TO STRIVE FOR A BETTER FUTURE, MUSTN’T WE BE FAMILIAR AND RECONCILED WITH OUR PAST?

He awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounded and as impossible as it actually was, happy. And during the...

I spent my life learning to feel less. Every day I felt less. Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?

It’s so hard to express yourself.’ I understand this.’I want to express myself.’The same is true for me.’ I’m looking for my voice.’ It’s in your mouth.’ I want to do something I’m not ashamed...

I imagine a line, a white line, painted on the sand and on the ocean, from me to you.

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...

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...

It can be challenge enough to have to eat with myself.

People care about animals. I believe that. They just don’t want to know or to pay. A fourth of all chickens have stress fractures. It’s wrong. They’re packed body to body, and can’t escape their...

Wings of a half finished book across his chest.

It was not the feeling of completeness I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty.

I realized that your mother couldn’t see the emptiness, she couldn’t see anything…All of the words I’d written to her over all of those years, had I never said anything to hear at all?

Then I have some bad news for you, because humans are going to destroy each other as soon as it becomes easy enough to, which will be very soon.

She was extending a hand I didn’t know how to take, so I broke its fingers with my silence.

Weeks passed like boats waiting to sail into the starless dawn, we were full of aimless endless darkness.

You did not have to finish it,” I said, because I could perceive that he was rebuilding the Great Wall of China with shit bricks.

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...

Nine out of ten significant people have to do with money or war!

I went to my grandmother, your great-great-grandmother, and asked her to write a letter. She was my mother’s mother. Your father’s mother’s mother’s mother. I hardly knew her. I didn’t have any interest in knowing...

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.

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...

I ran rather than walked, anxious to lose my way. All I wanted was to be unsure.

Brod’s 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...

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.

One day you will do things for me that you hate. That is what it means to be family.

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...

Her learning to sew (from a book Yankel brought back from Lvov) coincided with her refusal to wear any clothes that she did not make for herself, and when he bought her a book about...