I walked seven circles around you when we got married. I can’t even find you now.
Sam enjoyed knowledge. The accumulation and distribution of facts gave him a feeling of control, of utility, of the opposite of the powerlessness that comes with having a smallish, underdeveloped body that doesn’t dependably respond to the mental commands of a largish, overstimulated brain.
Everything was incredibly far away from me.
Does it make you sad that we love the kids more than we love each other?” That exact line – those words in that order – had been in the script for months.
I liked watching the baby make fists.
Let’s say what we mean: animals are bled, skinned, and dismembered while conscious. It happens all the time, and the industry and the government know it.
Your books are arranged by the color of their spines, she said. How stupid.
I have often felt that my vegetarianism matters more to such people than it does to me.
But as with my grandmother’s cooking, the food wasn’t food. It was story: ours was the dad who liked to take safe chances, who encouraged us to try the new thing because it was new, who liked it when people laughed at his mad-scientist cooking, because the laughter was more valuable than the taste of food could ever be.
I understand, now, the tragedy of my childhood. It wasn’t the bombing. It was that I never once liked a photograph of myself. I couldn’t.
If I misuse a corporation’s logo, I could potentially be put in jail; if a corporation abuses a billion birds, the law will protect not the birds, but the corporation’s right to do what it wants. That is what it looks like when you deny animals rights. It’s crazy that the idea of animal rights seems crazy to anyone. We live in a world in which it’s conventional to treat an animal like a hunk of wood and extreme to treat an animal like an animal. Before.
No father knows that he is carrying his son up the stairs for the final time.
Americans eat 150 times as many chickens as we did only eighty years ago.
You are very funny Jonathan.” “No. That is the last thing I want to be.” “Why? To be funny is a great thing.” “No it’s not.” “Why is this?” “I used to thing that humor was the only way to appreciate how wonderful and terrible the world is, to celebrate how big life is. You know what I mean?” “Yes of course.” “But now I think it’s the opposite. Humor is a way of shrinking from that wonderful and terrible world.
It’s so cold in Yukatia, which is in Siberia, that breath instantly freezes with a crackling noise that they call the whispering of the stars. On extremely cold days, the towns are covered in a fog caused by the breath of humans and animals.
More than any set of practices, factory farming is a mind-set: reduce production costs to the absolute minimum and systematically ignore or “externalize” such costs as environmental degradation, human disease, and animal suffering.
The beach was beautiful last night, but this did not surprise me. I love sitting on the edge of the land and feeling the water verge me, and then leave me. Sometimes I remove my shoes and put my feet where I think the water will approach to. I have attempted to think about America in regard to where I am on the beach. I imagine a line, a white line, painted on the sand and on the ocean, from me to you.
Yet we wanted human feeling, gestures free from suspicion, some sympathetic if stammering articulation, half syllables of mystification, a temporary eternal.
Our dreams cannot exist at the same time. I am so young, and he is so aged, and both of these facts should make us people who are deserving of their dreams, but this is not a possibility.
Isaac was buried in a pocketless shroud, six hundred yards from his wife of two hundred thousand hours.