Family are the people who must make you feel ashamed when you are deserving of shame.

The word vegetarian, I think, does a disservice because there are a lot of people who care but maybe don't care, or can't care in an ultimate way. If you think about environmentalism, nobody would ask, "Are you an environmentalist or not?" The question doesn't make any sense.

There has yet to be a human to survive a span of history without at least one end of the world.

I'm interested in the kind of religion that makes life harder. I'm not so interested in the comforting kind of religion.

...he enclosed pieces of string that he used to measure out his body--his head, thigh, forearm, finger, neck, everything. He wanted me to sleep with them under my pillow. He said that when he came back, we would remeasure his body against the string as proof that he hadn't changed.

I wasn’t having second thoughts, but I was having thoughts.

It was getting hard to keep all the things I didn't know inside me.