Find a printer paper and imagine a full-grown bird shaped something like a football with legs standing on it. Imagine 33,000 of these rectangles in a grid. (Broilers are never in cages, and never on multiple levels.) Now enclose the grid with windowless walls and put a ceiling on top. Run in automated (drug-laced) feed, water, heating, and ventilation systems. This is a farm.

I kept thinking how they were all names of dead people, and how names are basically the only thing dead people keep.

I woke up once in the middle of the night, and Buckminster's paws were on my eyelids. He must have been feeling my nightmares.

Literature was the only religion her father practiced, when a book fell on the floor he kissed it, when he was done with a book he tried to give it away to someone who would love it.

It’s a rule that we never listen to sad music, we made that rule early on, songs are as sad as the listener, we hardly ever listen to music.

This is the sixty-nine," I told him, presenting the magazine in front of him. I put my fingers -- two of them -- on the action, so that he would not overlook it. "Why is it dubbed sixty-nine?" he asked, because he is a person hot on fire with curiosity. "It was invented in 1969. My friend Gregory knows a friend of the nephew of the inventor." "What did people do before 1969?" "Merely blowjobs and masticating box, but never in chorus.

Technology celebrates connectedness, but encourages retreat.