I believe the intensity of the pity you feel for an animal has to do with how it evokes pity for yourself.... Innocence is something we humans pass through and leave behind, unable to return. But anim...
They don't want to see me lose my home. They want me to come to my senses before it's too late. I need a better way to cope with my feelings of loss and guilt. I need bereavement therapy. Here are som...
He has to forget you. He has to forget you and fall in love with me. That's what has to happen.
The dead dwell in the conditional, tense of the unreal. But there is also the extraordinary sense that you have become omniscient, that nothing we do or think or feel can be kept from you. The extraor...
I like that, well before T.S. Eliot expressed himself on the matter, Samuel Butler stated that the severest test of the imagination was naming a cat.
Who doesn't know that the dog is the epitome of devotion? But it's this devotion to humans, so instinctual that it's given freely even to persons who are unworthy of it, that has made me prefer cats....
The problem of self-loathing isn't new. What's new is the idea that it's the people with the history of greatest injustice who have the greatest right to be heard, and that the time has come for the a...
I confess to sudden rages. Walking in Midtown, rush hour's peak, people streaming in both directions, I find myself seething, ready to kill. Who are all these fucking people, and how is it fair, how i...
What exactly did Simone Weil mean when she said, When you have to make a decision in life, about what you should do, do what will cost you the most.Do what is difficult because it is difficult. Do wha...
To draw me out, the therapist asks what I did for the holidays. When I tell him he says gently (he says everything gently), Sounds like that's one of the ways your loss has affected you: not wanting t...
Anthropomorphism, I've decided, is inescapable, and though I might try to hide it I no longer fight it.
If I bring him home though, I swear he’ll spend the rest of his life waiting by the door. And he deserves better than that, don’t you think?’Yes, I think, my heart breaking.
Here is what I learned: Simone Weil was right. Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.
When people are very young they see animals as equals, even as kin. That humans are different, unique and superior to all other species - this they have to be taught.
If we could talk to animals, goes the song.Meaning, if they could talk to us.But of course that would ruin everything.
What we miss - what we lose and what we mourn - isn't it this that makes us who, deep down, we truly are.
Death the only god who must come when he’s called
I believe we must all retain, throughout our whole lives, a powerful memory of those early moments of life, a time when we were as much animal as human, the overwhelming feelings of helplessness and v...
It would undo me, I think, to glimpse some familiar piece of clothing, or a certain book or photograph, or to catch a hint of your smell. And I don't want to be undone like that, oh my God, not with y...
Is it true that the literary world is mined with hatred, a battlefield rimmed with snipers where jealousies and rivalries are always being played out? asked the NPR interviewer of the distinguished au...
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