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.

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

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.

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....

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

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,...

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 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.”...

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…

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

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...