“We had everything to say to each other, but no ways to say it.”

Every factory-farmed animal is, as a practice, treated in ways that would be illegal if it were a dog or a cat.

I never confused what I had with what I was.

Not responding is a response – we are equally responsible for what we don’t do.

The world is a big place,” he said, “but so is the inside of an apartment!

I was more alone than if I had been alone.

This is love, she thought, isn’t it? When you notice someone’s absence and hate that absence more than anything? More, even, than you love his presence?

I could not believe in a God that would challenge faith like this.

I dreamt four nights ago of clock hands descending from the universe like rain, of the moon as a green eye, of mirrors and insects, of a love that never withdrew. It was not the feeling of completeness that I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty.

I’d rather somebody hate what I do than be indifferent to it.

Also, I designed a pretty fascinating bracelet, where you put a rubber band around your favorite book of poems for a year, and then you take it off and wear it.

I felt shame for living in a nation of unprecedented prosperity-a nation that spends a smaller percentage of income on food than any other civilization has in human history-but in the name of affordability treats the animals it eats with cruelty so extreme it would be illegal if inflicted on a dog.

I put my hand on the doorknob because I thought maybe her hand was on the doorknob on the other side.

Every night before putting her to sleep, Yankel counts her ribs, as if one might have disappeared in the course of the day and become the seed and soil for some new companion to steal her away from him.

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.

I felt suddenly shy. I was not used to shy. I was used to shame. Shyness is when you turn your head away from something you want. Shame is when you turn your head away from something you do not want.

The hardest part of writing is not to get the ideas but to remember, why it is important to get them.

And I think, like, there’s a crucial difference between being, you know, Joe Schmo in the neighborhood and being the head, you know, of the government that, you know, in many ways is largely responsible for those conditions in the first place.

The best way of learning to be an independent sovereign state is to be an independent sovereign state.

I was at Rutgers University, and that was a center for Fluxus in a way. But it wasn’t what I was interested in.

Buildings become furniture, courtyards become carpets and arrases, the streets are like galleries, the boulevards conservatories. It is a house, one or two centuries old, rich, bourgeois, distinguished. The only way of going out, or shutting the door behind you, is to leave the centre.

One of the easiest ways to be irresponsible about power is to forget you have it.

Heidegger makes the distinction between being absorbed in the way things are in the world and being aware that things are in the world.

The way, and the only way, to stop this evil is for all the red men to unite in claiming a common and equal right in the land, as it was at first, and should be yet; for it was never divided, but belongs to all for the use of each.

Happiness is an abstraction, it is a product of the imagination, it is a way of being moved, which depends entirely on our way of seeing and feeling.