Food is not rational. Food is culture, habit, and identity.

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.

Life is precious, so I ought to spend my days, you know, making sandwiches for homeless people and tending to the elderly in hospice care. Life is precious, so I should give everything away, except that I live in the world. And in the world, I actually have needs and wants, and I value my needs and wants. And I live in the world, and I can't just go make sandwiches every day because I also have to take kids to school. I also have to, you know, write books because that's my livelihood.

In the end, everyone loses everyone. There was no invention to get around that.

It will never be the case that people won't eat meat. I think it could conceivably be the case one day that people eat very small amounts of it. That it's a special thing, rather than reach for it because it's cheap or reach for it because it's convenient, that it becomes something festive or something celebratory, once a week, and that could actually be achieved on small farms if we really changed our habits.

I flipped back through the pad of paper while I thought about what Stephen Hawking would do next.

In the past seven years of love-making he had heard the words "I love you" so many times: from the mouths of widows and children, from prostitutes, family friends, travelers, and adulterous wives. Women said "I love you" without his ever speaking. "The more you love someone," he came to think, "the harder it is to tell them." It surprised him that strangers didn't stop each other on the street to say "I love you".