All that mattered was him looking at me

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...

Canary light of oil lamps

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.

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.

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

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.

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...

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,...

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

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,...

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...

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’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...

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?

Wings of a half finished book across his chest.

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...

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.

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.