“Why does watching a dog be a dog fill one with happiness?”

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.

One of the greatest opportunities to live our values-or betray them-lies in the food we put on our plates.

I do think ordinariness is, in a way, the enemy, but not ordinariness as the opposite of flamboyance.

Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?

It made me start to wonder if there were other people so lonely so close. I thought about “Eleanor Rigby.” It’s true, where do they all come from? And where do they all belong?

My sister was the singer, and I always had the mentality there could only be one in the family.

Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to cast a stone.

One’s not half two. It’s two are halves of one.

One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.

Friends come and go but I wouldn’t have thought you’d be one of them.

We can look for beauty in the mirror, but the mirror only reflects one aspect of who we are.

Beware of confining yourself to a particular belief and denying all else, for much good would elude you – indeed, the knowledge of reality would elude you. Be in yourself a matter for all forms of belief, for God is too vast and tremendous to be restricted to one belief rather than another.

As her words became poetry, the poetry became a song. As her heart became his, he became one with her.