“Cruelty depends on an understanding of cruelty, and the ability to choose against it. Or to choose to ignore it.”

And she would say, “Today you believe in God?” And he would say, “Today I believe in love”.

Not responding is a response–we are equally responsible for what we don’t do. In the case of animal slaughter, to throw your hands in the air is to wrap your fingers around a knife handle.

The animals are those things that God likes but doesn’t love.

I have so much to say to you. I want to begin at the beginning, because that is what you deserve. I want to tell you everything, without leaving out a single detail. But where is the beginning? And what is everything?

It’s so beautiful at this hour. The sun is low, the shadows are long, the air is cold and clean. You won’t be awake for another five hours, but I can’t help feeling that we’re sharing this clear and beautiful morning.

You can call your turkey organic and torture it daily.

You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.

When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own.

I can only hold on to the things I want to lose.

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?

This is my heart. You are touching it with your left hand. You are touching it with your left hand, not because you are left-handed, although you might be, but because I am holding it against my heart. What you are feeling is the beating of my heart. It is what keeps me alive.

I have no need for the past, I thought, like a child. I did not consider that the past might have a need for me.

Words never mean what we want them to mean.

If I’d been someone else in a different world I’d’ve done something different, but I was myself and the world was the world, so I was silent.

We talked about nothing in particular, but it felt like we were talking about the most important things.

The only thing more painful than being an active forgetter is to be an inert rememberer.

He was a foe without hate; a friend without treachery; a soldier without cruelty; a victor without oppression, and a victim without murmuring.

It seems to me that a man who is incapable of humor is capable of cruelty.

Cruelty, very far from being a vice, is the first sentiment Nature injects in us all.

Cruelty is simply the energy in a man civilization has not yet altogether corrupted: therefore it is a virtue, not a vice.

Cruelty does not make a person dishonest, the same way bravery does not make a person kind.

Lust is to the other passions what the nervous fluid is to life; it supports them all, lends strength to them all ambition, cruelty, avarice, revenge, are all founded on lust.

The mountains clench their great hands full of hidden fire. There are sharks in the sea, and there is cruelty in men’s eyes.

Cruelty, very far from being a vice, is the first sentiment Nature injects in us all.