“A Partial History of My StupidityTraffic was heavy coming off the bridgeand I took the road to the right, the wrong one,and got stuck in the car for hours.Most nights I rushed out into the eveningwithout paying attention to the trees,whose names I didn't know,or the birds, which flew heedlessly on.I couldn't relinquish my desiresor accept them, and so I strolled alonglike a tiger that wanted to spring,but was still afraid of the wildness within.The iron bars seemed invisible to others,but I carried a cage around inside me.I cared too much what other people thoughtand made remarks I shouldn't have made.I was slient when I should have spoken.Forgive me, philosophers,I read the Stoics but never understood them.I felt that I was living the wrong life,spiritually speaking,while halfway around the worldthousands of people were being slaughtered,some of them by my countrymen.So I walked on--distracted, lost in thought--and forgot to attend to those who sufferedfar away, nearby.Forgive me, faith, for never having any.I did not believe in God,who eluded me.”

“I need to live like that crooked tree--...that knelt down in the hardest windsbut could not be blasted away.”

“People care about animals. I believe that. They just don’t want to know or to pay. A fourth of all chickens have stress fractures. It’s wrong. They’re packed body to body, and can’t escape their waste, and never see the sun. Their nails grow around the bars of their cages. It’s wrong. They feel their slaughters. It’s wrong, and people know it’s wrong. They don’t have to be convinced. They just have to act differently. I’m not better than anyone, and I’m not trying to convince people to live by my standards of what’s right. I’m trying to convince them to live by their own.”

“I wanted to tell them that I'd never had a friend, not ever, not a real one. Until Dante. I wanted to tell them that I never knew that people like Dante existed in the world, people who looked at the stars, and knew the mysteries of water, and knew enough to know that birds belonged to the heavens and weren't meant to be shot down from their graceful flights by mean and stupid boys. I wanted to tell them that he had changed my life and that I would never be the same, not ever. And that somehow it felt like it was Dante who had saved my life and not the other way around. I wanted to tell them that he was the first human being aside from my mother who had ever made me want to talk about the things that scared me. I wanted to tell them so many things and yet I didn't have the words. So I just stupidly repeated myself. "Dante's my friend.”

“I just got a rather nasty shock. In looking for something or other I came across the fact that one of my cats is about to be nine years old, and that another of them will shortly thereafter be eight; I have been labouring under the delusion they were about five and six. And yesterday I happened to notice in the mirror that while I have long since grown used to my beard being very grey indeed, I was not prepared to discover that my eyebrows are becoming noticeably shaggy. I feel the tomb is just around the corner. And there are all these books I haven't read yet, even if I am simultaneously reading at least twenty...”

“And that day, I probably walked right by them out of class, not really knowing either of them or having any idea who they'd end up being to me, but I can imagine it so accurately because I was then (and I guess I am still) in my own world of misreading people, reaching out to them in an awkward, overplanned way that blows up big-time, then retreating back in to my just-me existence, while they go around telling anyone who will listen what a tard I am.”

“In my return to church, I had learned the hard way to avoid assumptions about other people's faith. For one thing, people kept surprising me. If I listened carefully to them, my conjectures about what they thought usually turned out to be wrong. For another thing, I was insecure enough about my own faith, such as it was, to resent other people telling me what they thought I believed and why they thought I believed it. So I tried to hear what my friends say about joining their loved ones after death without assuming I knew exactly what they meant.”