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

Because it was starting to get dark, and because the streets were crowded, I bumped into a googolplex people. Who were they? Where were they going? What were they looking for? I wanted to hear their heartbeats, and I wanted them to hear mine.

I'm a novelist, I'm not an activist. I'm not a non-fiction writer, I'm not a journalist. I'm not a foodie, I'm not even really an animal person, or an environmentalist. I did the best I could with this, but it's not who I am.

There is an overabundance of rational reasons to say no to factory-farmed meat: It is the No. 1 cause of global warming, it systematically forces tens of billions of animals to suffer in ways that would be illegal if they were dogs, it is a decisive factor in the development of swine and avian flus, and so on.

Years were passing through the spaces between moments.

In the morning, when the nothing vase casts a something shadow, like the memory of someone you've lost, what can you say about that?

I want to talk about God in a literary way. But I think I would have a very hard time praying to God.