I hope you never think about anything as much as I think about you.
We talked about nothing in particular, but it felt like we were talking about the most important things...
I watched the sheets breathe when she breathed, like how Dad used to say that trees inhale when people exhale, because I was too young to understand the truth about biological processes.
We are not long-term beings. Not heroes of romances in many volumes. For one gesture, for one word alone, we shall make the effort. We openly admit: our creations will be temporary. We shall have this as our aim: a gesture.
The hardest part of writing is not to get the ideas but to remember, why it is important to get them.
We spent our lives making livings.
The philosopher Elaine Scarry has observed that “beauty always takes place in the particular.” Cruelty, on the other hand, prefers abstraction.
Literature was the only religion her father practiced, when a book fell on the floor he kissed it, when he was done with a book he tried to give it away to someone who would love it.
The factory farm has succeeded by divorcing people from their food, eliminating farmers, and ruling agriculture by corporate fiat.
We are lying to ourselves and to each other. Lying about what? I don’t care if we’re lying. I am a bad person. I don’t care. I don’t care what you are.
I wasn’t trying to invent better and better homes, but to show her that homes didn’t matter, we could live in any home, in any city, in any country, in any century, and be happy, as if the world were just what we lived in.
People around the world were moving from one place to another. No one was staying.
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.
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.
It can be challenge enough to have to eat with myself.
It’s hard to say goodbye to the place you’ve lived. It can be as hard as saying goodbye to a person.
He was someone whom everyone admired and liked but whom nobody knew. He was like a book that you could feel good holding, that you could talk about without ever having read, that you could recommend.
I tried to think about other things. I tried to invent optimistic inventions. But the pessimistic ones were extremely loud.
I wouldn’t want a boy to think I was pretty unless he was the kind of boy who thought I was pretty.
She was not crying Which surprised me very much But I understand now That she had found places For her melancholy That were behind more masks Than only her eyes.