Another question: why do people often find animal suffering harder to accept than the suffering of other human beings?
Another memory. She walks into the kitchen, sits down at the kitchen counter with me, and says, I just got a very interesting phone call. It was some guy who said he was doing a survey for the Maidenf...
A pause here to confess, not without shame: I never heard the news that you'd fallen in love without experiencing a pang, nor could I suppress a surge of joy each time I heard that you were breaking u...
A friend of mine who is working on a memoir says, I hate the idea of writing as some kind of catharsis, because it seems like that can't possibly produce a good book.You cannot hope to console yoursel...
If reading really does increase empathy, as we are constantly being told that it does, it appears that writing takes some away.
It’s not uncommon to wish to have known what a person you’ve come to love was like before you met them. It hurts, almost, not to have known what a beloved was like as a child. I have felt this way abo...
It’s always good to start off anything by breaking a rule.
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...
It is widely believed that although animals don't know that one day they'll die, many of them do know when they're actually dying. So at what point does a dying animal become aware of what's happening...
It is one of the great bafflements of student fiction. I have read that college students can spend up to ten hours a day on social media. But for the people they write about - also mostly college stud...
Is this the madness at the heart of it? Do I believe that if I am good to him, if I act selflessly and make sacrifices for him, do I believe that if I love Apollo - beautiful, aging, melancholy Apollo...
In a book I am reading the author talks about word people versus fist people. As if words could not also be fists. Aren't often fists.
Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.
Writing poetry is like prayer, and prayer isn’t something you have to share with other people.
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.
I was not the only one who made the mistake of thinking that, because it was something you talked about a lot, it was something you wouldn't do. And after all, you were not the unhappiest person we kn...
I once heard a stranger in agitated conversation with her pug: And I suppose it's all my fault again, isn't it? At which, I swear, the dog rolled its eyes.
There is at least one book in you that cannot be written by anyone else but you. My advice is to dig deep and find
You caught some flak for questioning whether there could really be such a thing as a flâneuse. You didn’t think it was possible for a woman to wander the streets in the same spirit and manner as a man...
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...
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