They reciprocated the great and saving lie--that our love for things is greater than our lover for our love for things--willfully playing the parts they wrote for themselves, willfully creating and believing fictions necessary for life.

Just because you're an atheist, that doesn't mean you wouldn't love for things to have reasons for why they are.

This is the sixty-nine," I told him, presenting the magazine in front of him. I put my fingers -- two of them -- on the action, so that he would not overlook it. "Why is it dubbed sixty-nine?" he asked, because he is a person hot on fire with curiosity. "It was invented in 1969. My friend Gregory knows a friend of the nephew of the inventor." "What did people do before 1969?" "Merely blowjobs and masticating box, but never in chorus.

Of course food has an important cultural use in families, but there are things that have more important cultural uses in families, and broadening the conversation out simply from what's reasonable also allows in other things.

It was the first time I had ever made love. I wondered if he knew that. It felt like crying. I wondered, Why does anyone ever make love?

I first became a vegetarian when I was nine, in response to an argument made by a radical babysitter. My great change - which lasted a couple of weeks - was based on the very simple instinct that it's wrong to kill animals for food.

Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does.