I kept thinking how they were all names of dead people, and how names are basically the only thing dead people keep.
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 is the bread of our affliction.
Life is upsetting, Irv said. Like blood is wet.
She wrote, I wish I could be a girl again, with a chance to live my life again. I have suffered so much more than I needed to. And the joys I have felt have not always been joyous. I could have lived differently.
I couldn't explain to her that I missed him more, more than she or anyone else missed him, because I could't tell her about what happened with the phone. That secret was a hole in the middle of me that every happy thing fell into.
I wanted to shout myself into his ear.
But unlike all farmed meat, which requires the creation and maintenance of animals, dogs are practically begging to be eaten. Three to four million dogs and cats are euthanized annually. This amounts to millions of pounds of meat now being thrown away every year.
There has yet to be a human to survive a span of history without at least one end of the world.
He was like a book that you could feel good holding, that you could talk about without ever having read, that could you recommend.
It probably gets pretty lonely to be anyone.
Sometimes people who seem good end up being not as good as you might have hoped, you know?
When we talk about protecting our right to have guns, we are talking about protecting our right to shoot bullets. So what is it that's so important to shoot at?
Was one of the best days of my life, a day during which I lived my life and didn't think about my life at all.
I've thought myself out of happinessone one million times, but never once into it.
I trust that you have a good purpose for your ignorance.
In the morning, when the nothing vase casts a something shadow, like the memory of someone you've lost, what can you say about that?
I decided then and there never to become someone who told jokes when explanations were impossible.
The appearance was misleading- human dreams; rubbish heaps abundant yet ephemeral sudden and splendid, only to wilt and perish.
They hadn't forgotten but accommodated... So nothing was done. No decisions were made... They waited like fools, they sat on their hands like fools, and spoke, like fools... They waited to die, and we cannot blame them, because we would do the same, we do do the same.
Alone, one can live perfectly. But not a life.
In truth I was manufacturing a brick wall of shits.
Which, then, brings us closer to what we want to communicate: saying what we intend, or trying to say the opposite?
People don't care enough. They don't get worked up enough. They don't get angry enough. They don't get passionate enough. I'd rather somebody hate what I do than be indifferent to it.
The end of suffering does not justify the suffering.
Our culture is an edifice built of external memories, a way of fending off mortality.
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 I such a bad person for dreaming of a world that ends when I do? I don't mean the world ending with respect to me, but every set of eyes closing with mine.
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 make the easiest decision, a decision that is increasingly problematic.
The French, who love their dogs, sometimes eat their horses. The Spanish, who love their horses, sometimes eat their cows. The Indians, who love their cows, sometimes eat their dogs.
I said, not knowing what the next words out of my mouth would be, but wanting them to be mine, wanting, more than I'd ever wanted anything, to express the center of me to and be understood.
Sadness of not knowing enough words to [express what you mean]...
My life story is the story of everyone I've ever met.
I'm telling you all of this because I'll never be your father, and you will always be my child.
I missed you even when I was with you. That's been my problem. I miss what I already have, and I surround myself with things that are missing.
Our stories are so fundamental to us that it's easy to forget that we choose them.
All told, farmed animals in the United States produce 130 times as much waste as the human population.
I could tell that Mom was dreaming, but I didn't want to know what she was dreaming about, because I had enough of my own nightmares, and if she had been dreaming something happy, I would have been angry at her for dreaming something happy.
It was the feeling of not wanting to live in the world, even if it was the only place to live.
The end of suffering does not justify the suffering, and so there is no end to suffering.
Can't you even tell me if I'm on the right track?" Buckminster purred, and Dad shrugged his shoulders again. "But if you don't tell me anything, how can I ever be right?" He circled something in an article and said, "Another way of looking at it would be, how could you ever be wrong?
Why do I write? It's not that I want people to think I am smart, or even that I am a good writer. I write because I want to end my loneliness.
From where she is, the page- her paper-thin future-is infinitely heavy.
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 multifaceted — that concern us. The word defines our gaze even more than what we are looking at.
The difference between conceding and accepting is depression.
Oh,' she said. 'I have never seen a Jew before. Can I see his horns?
It is better to lose than never to have had.
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 one is forcing us to act one way or another.
You only get to keep what you refuse to let go off.
When a book remembers, we remember. It reminds you that you have a body. So many of the things we may think of as burdensome are actually the things that make us more human.
Two friends are ordering lunch. One says, 'I'm in the mood for a burger,' and orders it. The other says, 'I'm in the mood for a burger,' but remembers that there are things more important to him than what he is in the mood for at any given moment, and orders something else. Who is the sentimentalist?
