This isn't animal experimentation, where you an imagine some proportionate good at the other end of the suffering. This is what we feel like eating. Tell me something: Why is taste, the crudest of our sense, exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other sense? If you stop and think about it, it's crazy. Why doesn't a horny person has as strong a claim to raping an animal as a hungry one does to killing and eating it?

While it is always possible to wake a person who's sleeping, no amount of noise will wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.

Family are the people who must make you feel ashamed when you are deserving of shame.

I'm not better than anyone, and I'm not trying to convince people to live by my standards of what's right. I'm trying to convince them to live by their own.

I often think about how my sons will come to know about September 11th. Something overheard? A newspaper image? In school? I would prefer that they learn about it from my wife and me, in a deliberate and safe way. But it's hard to imagine ever feeling ready to broach the subject without some impetus.

Everybody knows the competing identities of people who have kids.

People who want to find a place of rest, want to find an integrated personality, sense of self, want fewer fractures in their lives.