She had fallen in love so many times that she began to suspect she was not falling in love at all, but doing something much more ordinary.

If people thought about food more like how we think about the environment, a lot of people would be eating differently and the whole system would look a lot different.

People don’t care enough. They don’t get worked up enough. They don’t get angry enough. They don’t get passionate enough. I’d rather somebody hate what I do than be indifferent to it.

Something having been done just about everywhere just about always is no kind of justification for doing it now.

I went to the guest room and pretended to write. I hit the space bar again and again and again. My life story was spaces.

I asked my schoolmate Mary to write a letter to me. She was funny and full of life. She liked to run around her empty house without any clothes on, even once she was too old for that. Nothing embarrassed her. I admired that so much, because everything embarrassed me, and that hurt me. She loved to jump on her bed. She jumped on her bed for so many years that one afternoon, while I watched her jump, the seams burst. Feathers filled the small room. Our laughter kept the feathers in the air. I thought about birds. Could they fly if there wasn’t someone, somewhere, laughing?

Everything that's born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they're all on fire, and we're all trapped.