I never confused what I had with what I was.

I didn't intend to write about totems or people searching. I tried not to constrain myself, and this is what I ended up with. There's this great Auden quote: "I look at what I write so I can see what I think."

...there are only some many times you can utter "It does not hurt" before it begins to hurt even more than the hurt.

Oh,' she said. 'I have never seen a Jew before. Can I see his horns?

It is better to lose than never to have had.

However much we obfuscate or ignore it, we know that the factory farm is inhumane in the deepest sense of the word. And we know that there is something that matters in a deep way about the lives we create for the living beings most within our power. Our response to the factory farm is ultimately a test of how we respond to the powerless, to the most distant, to the voiceless--it is a test of how we act when no one is forcing us to act one way or another.

Sometimes I can feel my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.