I want an infinitely blank book and the rest of time…
…why didn’t I learn to treat everything like it was the last time, my greatest regret is how much I believed in the future.
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.
I am always sad, I think. Perhaps this signifies that I am not sad at all, because sadness is something lower than your normal disposition, and I am always the same thing. Perhaps I am the only person in the world, then, who never becomes sad. Perhaps I am lucky.
I don’t think that there are any limits to how excellent we could make life seem.
Time was passing like a hand waving from a train I wanted to be on.
I hope you never have to think about anything as much as I think about you.
She let out a laugh, and then she put her hand over her mouth, like she was angry at herself for forgetting her sadness.
You are the only one who has understood even a whisper of me, and I will tell you that I am the only person who has understood even a whisper of you.
If we were to one day encounter a form of life more powerful and intelligent than our own, and it regarded us as we regard fish, what would be our argument against being eaten?
It was not the feeling of completeness I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty.
I will describe my eyes and then begin the story. My eyes are blue and resplendent. Now I will begin the story.
I kept thinking how they were all names of dead people, and how names are basically the only thing dead people keep.
Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.
She was like a drowning person, flailing, reaching for anything that might save her. Her life was an urgent, desperate struggle to justify her life.
I imagine a line, a white line, painted on the sand and on the ocean, from me to you.
He promised us that everything would be okay. I was a child, but I knew that everything would not be okay. That did not make my father a liar. It made him my father.
When I heard your organization was recording testimonies, I knew I had to come. She died in my arms, saying ‘I don’t want to die.’ That is what death is like. It doesn’t matter what uniforms the soldiers are wearing. It doesn’t matter how good the weapons are. I thought if everyone could see what I saw, we would never have war anymore.
Find a printer paper and imagine a full-grown bird shaped something like a football with legs standing on it. Imagine 33,000 of these rectangles in a grid. (Broilers are never in cages, and never on multiple levels.) Now enclose the grid with windowless walls and put a ceiling on top. Run in automated (drug-laced) feed, water, heating, and ventilation systems. This is a farm.
Anyone who believes that a second is faster than a decade did not live life.
I’m sorry for my inability to let unimportant things go, for my inability to hold on to the important things.
That is what death is like. It doesn’t matter what uniforms the soldiers are wearing. It doesn’t matter how good the weapons are. I thought if everyone could see what I saw, we would never have war anymore.
Feathers filled the small room. Our laughter kept the feathers in the air. I thought about birds. Could they fly if there wasn’t someone, somewhere, laughing?
Why didn’t I learn to treat everything like it was the last time. My greatest regret was how much I believed in the future.
It’s true, I am afraid of dying. I am afraid of the world moving forward without me, of my absence going unnoticed, or worse, being some natural force propelling life on. Is it selfish? Am I such a bad person for dreaming of a world that ends when I do? I don’t mean the world ending with respect to me, but every set of eyes closing with mine.
I said, ‘I need to know how he died.’He flipped back and pointed at, ‘Why?’So I can stop inventing how he died. I’m always inventing.
She died in my arms, saying, I don’t want to die. That is what death is like. It doesn’t matter what uniforms the soldiers are wearing. It doesn’t matter how good the weapons are. I thought if everyone could see what I saw, we would never have war anymore.
I thought about all of the things that everyone ever says to each other, and how everyone is going to die, whether it’s in a millisecond, or days, or months, or 76.5 years, if you were just born. Everything that’s born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they’re all on fire, and we’re all trapped.
Needless to say, jamming deformed, drugged, overstressed birds together in a filthy, waste-coated room is not very healthy. Beyond deformities, eye damage, blindness, bacterial infections of bones, slipped vertebrae, paralysis, internal bleeding, anemia, slipped tendons, twisted lower legs and necks, respiratory diseases, and weakened immune systems are frequent and long-standing problems on factory farms.