If we are not given the option to live without violence, we are given the choice to center our meals around harvest or slaughter, husbandry or war. We have chosen slaughter. We have chosen war. That's the truest version of our story of eating animals. Can we tell a new story?

The images of his infinite pasts and infinite futures washed over him as he waited, paralyzed, in the present.

The Eskimos have four hundred words for snow, and the Jewshave four hundred for schmuck.

Every night before putting her to sleep, Yankel counts her ribs, as if one might have disappeared in the course of the day and become the seed and soil for some new companion to steal her away from him.

So many people enter and leave your life! Hundreds of thousands of people! You have to keep the door open so they can come in! But it also means you have to let them go!

Some make their worlds without knowing it. Their universes are just sesame seeds and three-day weekends and dial tones and skinned knees and physics and driftwood and emerald earrings and books dropped in bathtubs and holes in guitars and plastic and empathy and hardwood and heavy water and high black stockings and the history of the Vikings and brass and obsolescence and burnt hair and collapsed souffles and the impossibility of not falling in love in an art museum with the person standing next to you looking at the same painting and all the other things that just happen and are.

I would have done anything for him. Maybe that was my sickness.