I wanted so much to have a life. Even just once, even for a second.

Just about every children's book in my local bookstore has an animal for its hero. But then, only a few feet away in the cookbook section, just about every cookbook includes recipes for cooking animals. Is there a more illuminating illustration of our paradoxical relationship with the nonhuman world?

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

Only now do I understand the war against boredom, the lost cause of empty hours, of empty days and nights.

But come. No explaining or mending. Be beside me somewhere.

It’s a rule that we never listen to sad music, we made that rule early on, songs are as sad as the listener, we hardly ever listen to music.

She said, "Do you have more things that you need, or more that you don't need?" I said, "It depends on what it means to need.