What do babies dream of? She must be dreaming of the before-life, just as I dream of the afterlife.
Was his death an essential stage in the continuation of his life?
My boots were so heavy that I was glad there was a column beneath us. How could such a lonely person have been living so close to me my whole life? If I had known, I would have gone up to keep him company.
What does it remember like?
We aren’t exactly emptying the oceans; it’s more like clear-cutting a forest with thousands of species to create massive fields with one type of soybean.
Everything that’s born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they’re all on fire, and we’re all trapped.
I did not need to know if he could love me. I needed to know if he could need me.
The images of his infinite pasts and infinite futures washed over him as he waited, paralyzed, in the present.
For how long could we fail until we surrendered?
And also, there are so many times when you need to make a quick escape, but humans don’t have their own wings, or not yet, anyway, so what about a birdseed shirt?
I think after you live it’s like before you lived.
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.
He removed several pages of death certificates, which were picked up by another breeze and sent into the trees. Some would fall with the leaves that September. Some would fall with the trees generations later.
She is deranged, but so so playful.
Life was a small negative space cut out of the eternal solidity, and for the first time, it felt precious – not like all of the words that had come to mean nothing, but like the last breath of a drowning victim.
Succotash my Balzac, dipshiitake.
Which, then, brings us closer to what we want to communicate: saying what we intend, or trying to say the opposite?
Everything is the way it is because everything was the way it was.
Factory farming, of course, does not cause all the world’s problems, but is is remarkable just how many of them intersect there.
I love the idea of books being more than books, or being, rather, something other than books.