What about little microphones? What if everyone swallowed them, and they played the sounds of our hearts through a little speaker. [...] I wonder if everyone's hearts would start to beat at the same time.

The philosopher Elaine Scarry has observed that "beauty always takes place in the particular." Cruelty, on the other hand, prefers abstraction.

It was one of the best days of my life, a day during which I lived my life and didn't think about my life at all.

None of the ways people were talking about September 11 felt right to me. I don't buy into the way George W. Bush talks about it. I don't buy into the way the 9/11 commission talks about it. It isn't that I don't believe them. It's just that they're not the tellings for me.

As long as I am thinking, I am alive.

Life was a small negative space cut out of the eternal solidity, and for the first time, it felt precious - not like all of the words that had come to mean nothing, but like the last breath of a drowning victim.

Stories about food are stories about us-our history and our values.