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He has seen again and again how the most expensive effort often fails to lead up to interest, and he has seen how it may bloom in soil of no more worth than so many layers of dust and ashes. He has learnt in fact — he learns greatly in America — to mistrust any plea for it directly made by money, which operates too often as the great puffing motor-car framed for whirling him, in his dismay, quite away from it.

These adventures of the critical spirit were such mere mild walks and talks as I almost blush to offer, on this reduced scale, as matter of history; but I draw courage from the remembrance that history is never, in any rich sense, the immediate crudity of what "happens," but the much finer complexity of what we read into it and think of in connection with it.

It broke my heart into more pieces than my heart was made of, why can't people say what they mean at the time? (p. 279)

By the standards of the international human rights community, the typical working conditions in America's slaughterhouses constitute human rights violations.

"Why do beautiful songs make you sad?" "Because they aren't true." "Never?" "Nothing is beautiful and true." (p. 43)

I spent my life learning to feel less.

Every day I felt less.

Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?

You can not protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.

He had a wall of masks from every country he‘d been to, like Armenia and Chile and Ethiopia. It‘s not a horrible world, he told me, but it‘s filled with a lot of horrible people.

Sometimes I can feel my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living. (p. 113)

In the end, everyone loses everyone. There was no invention to get around that, and so I felt, that night, like the turtle that everything else in the universe was on top of. (p. 74)

Just how destructive does a culinary preference have to be before we decide to eat something else?

My friends are appeased to stay in Odessa for their entire lives. They are appeased to age like their parents, and become parents like their parents. They do not desire anything more than everything they have known.

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 could never have war anymore. (p. 189)