“The French, who love their dogs, sometimes eat their horses. The Spanish, who love their horses, sometimes eat their cows. The Indians, who love their cows, sometimes eat their dogs.”

I wasn’t trying to invent better and better homes, but to show her that homes didn’t matter, we could live in any home, in any city, in any country, in any century, and be happy, as if the world were just what we lived in.

It broke my heart into more pieces than my heart was made of, why can’t people say what they mean at the time?

I wish my days could be washed away like the chalk lines of my days.

Ironically, the utterly unselective omnivore — “I’m easy; I’ll eat anything” — can appear more socially sensitive than the individual who tries to eat in a way that is good for society.

He couldn’t bear to live, but he couldn’t bear to die. He couldn’t bear the thought of he making love to someone else, but neither could he bear the absence of the thought. And as for the note, he couldn’t bear to keep it, but he couldn’t bear to destroy it either.

Food for her is not food, it is terror, dignity, gratitude, vengeance, joyfulness, humiliation, religion, history, and, of course, love. As if the fruit she always offered us were picked from the destroyed brances of out family tree.

Thanksgiving is the holiday that encompasses all others. All of them, from Martin Luther King Day to Arbor Day to Christmas to Valentine’s Day, are in one way or another about being thankful.

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.

Isn’t it strange how upset people get about a few dozen baseball players taking growth hormones, when we’re doing what we’re doing to our food animals and feeding them to our children?

She laughed enough to migrate an entire flock of birds. That was how she said yes.

We spent our lives making livings.

Sometimes I imagined stitching all of our little touches together. How many hundreds of thousands of fingers brushing against each other does it take to make love? Why does anyone ever make love?

She had fallen in love so many times that she began to suspect she was not falling in love at all, but doing something much more ordinary.

Of course food has an important cultural use in families, but there are things that have more important cultural uses in families, and broadening the conversation out simply from what’s reasonable also allows in other things.

I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live.

It’s hard to say goodbye to the place you’ve lived. It can be as hard as saying goodbye to a person.

The irony is when I originally wrote the song, it was called “Mary’s Lullaby.” I wrote it from Mary’s standpoint and it was in a higher key, a real falsetto, and it just wasn’t right.

Listen: our culture is saturated with irony whether we know it or not.

Don’t underestimate the value of irony-it is extremely valuable.

My direction is very anti-contemplative. If you thought I was for commercial products, you’d think there was no irony. The irony isn’t meant to be an ironic comment on our society, exactly.

If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.

Without a trace of irony I can say I have been blessed with brilliant enemies. I owe them a great debt, because they redoubled my energies and drove me in new directions.

From even the greatest of horrors, irony is seldom absent.

The supreme irony of life is that hardly anyone gets out of it alive.