When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own.

Jed Perl writes precisely and ecstatically. Antoine' s Alphabet is a history and a fairy tale, a work of criticism, and a work of art.

What is suffering? I'm not sure what it is, but I know that suffering is the name we give to the origin of all the sighs, screams, and groans — small and large, crude and multifaceted — that concern us. The word defines our gaze even more than what we are looking at.

Nine out of ten significant people have to do with money or war!

The paper, the stapler, the staples, the tape. It makes me sick. Physical things. Forty years of loving someone becomes staples and tape.

We are breeding creatures incapable of surviving in any place other than the most artificial settings. We have focused the awesome power of modern genetic knowledge to bring into being animals that suffer more.

There were things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him. So I buried them, and let them hurt me.