It has shown me that everything is illuminated in the light of the past. It is always along the side of us...on the inside, looking out.

If it weren't my life, I wouldn't have believed it.

We need a better way to talk about eating animals, a way that doesn't ignore, or even just shruggingly accept things like habits, cravings, family and history, but rather incorporates them into the conversation. The more they are allowed in, the more strongly we will want to follow our best instincts.

But when, at the end of my sophomore year, I became a philosophy major and started doing my first seriously pretentious thinking, I became a vegetarian again. The kind of willful forgetting that I was sure meat eating required felt too paradoxical to the intellectual life I was trying to shape. I thought life could, should, and must conform to the mold of reason. You can imagine how annoying this made me.

Maybe I'll try to be more patient with morons.

Fiction works when it makes a reader feel something strongly.

A few weeks after the worst day, I started writing lots of letters. I don't know why, but it was one of the only things that made my boots lighter.