Life is filled with small moments that seem prosaic until one has the distance to look back and see the chain of large moments they unleashed.

And though some days it is very hard, I try not to live for the future. And I try not to dream of the past.

Dead … might not be quiet at all.

As Jeremy Bentham had asked about animals well over two hundred years ago, the question was not whether they could reason or talk, but could they suffer? And yet, somehow, it seemed to take more imagination for humans to identify with animal suffering than it did to conceive of space flight or cloning or nuclear fusion. Yes, she was a fanatic in the eyes of most of the country. . .Mostly, however, she just lacked patience for people who wouldn't accept her belief that humans inflicted needless agony on the animals around them, and they did so in numbers that were absolutely staggering.

Lie. Put down on paper the most interesting lies you can imagine. . .and then make them plausible.

The reality is that most of North America knows next to nothing of the 20th centurys first genocide - the systematic slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians in the First World War.

My grandparents, like many genocide survivors, took most of their stories to their graves.