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

It would be possible, in theory, for life and art to be reversed.

What the meat industry figured out is that you don't need healthy animals to make a profit. Sick animals are more profitable... Factory farms calculate how close to death they can keep animals without killing them. That's the business model. How quickly they can be made to grow, how tightly they can be packed, how much or how little can they eat, how sick they can get without dying...We live in a world in which it's conventional to treat an animal like a block of wood.

We shared the smile of recognizing ourselves in each other.

I can't even say 'hair pie,'' I told him, 'unless I'm talking about an actual pie made out of rabbits.

I didn't feel empty. I wished I'd felt empty. ... I wanted to be empty like an overturned pitcher. But I was full like a stone.

Feathers filled the small room. Our laughter kept the feathers in the air. I thought about birds. Could they fly is there wasn't someone, somewhere, laughing?