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

She said, “Do you have more things that you need, or more that you don’t need?” I said, “It depends on what it means to need.

In truth I was manufacturing a brick wall of shits.

It can be challenge enough to have to eat with myself.

Love me, because love doesn’t exist, and I have tried everything that does.

We could imagine all sorts of universes unlike this one, but this is the one that happened.

It’s the tragedy of loving, you can’t love anything more than something you miss.

Choosing leaf or flesh, factory farm or family farm, does not in itself change the world, but teaching ourselves, our children, our local communities, and our nation to choose conscience over ease can.

She was a genius of sadness, immersing herself in it, separating its numerous strands, appreciating its subtle nuances. She was a prism through which sadness could be divided into its infinite spectrum.

Sometimes people who seem good end up being not as good as you might have hoped, you know?

I missed you even when I was with you. That’s been my problem. I miss what I already have, and I surround myself with things that are missing.

Everything is to protect you. I exist in case you need to be protected.

We often use technology to save time, but increasingly, it either takes the saved time along with it, or makes the saved time less present, intimate and rich. I worry that the closer the world gets to our fingertips, the further it gets from our hearts.

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.